Five women wheat scientists from China, Ethiopia, Germany, India and Uruguay were named WIT Early Career Award winners, and a scientist in Australia was recognized with the 2020 WIT Mentor Award. The winners will be celebrated May 21 from 10-11 a.m. at the virtual event “The Changing Face of Leadership and Research in Wheat.” The event includes a keynote from World Food Prize president Barbara Stinson and a panel discussion with former WIT award winners.
“The future of wheat science depends on innovative, enthusiastic researchers,” said Maricelis Acevedo, senior research associate in the Department of Global Development, adjunct professor of plant pathology in the School of Integrative Plant Science, and associate director for science of the Delivering Genetic Gain in Wheat (DGGW) project.
“We are thrilled to honor these incredible scientists with a WIT award and continue the tradition of recognizing the next generation of top-notch scientists and the people who mentor them,” Acevedo said.
The BGRI is an international consortium based at Cornell with the goal to protect the world’s wheat supplies. The global network of scientists and farmers work to reduce the world’s vulnerability to fungal rust diseases in wheat and enhance global productivity to withstand future threats to the crop.
With this cohort, the BGRI has recognized 55 early career award winners since 2010.
“Building capacity within the scientific community by encouraging and supporting the training of young women scientists has always been one of the BGRI’s key goals,” Acevedo said. “Over the last decade, these scientists have emerged as leaders across the wheat community. We sincerely thank all the mentors who have supported these women’s efforts.”
The WIT Early Career Award provides early career women working in wheat with the opportunity for additional training, mentorship, and leadership opportunities. The WIT Mentor Award, first awarded in 2011, recognizes the efforts of men and women who have played a significant role in shaping the careers of women working in wheat and demonstrated a commitment to increasing gender parity in agriculture.
2020 WIT Early Career Winners
- Anna Elizabeth Backhaus, from Germany, is a second-year Ph.D. student at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom. Her work focuses on the genetic network in control of early spike development in wheat. She has also worked at the Max Planck Institute and ICARDA.
- Bharati Pandey, from India, is a scientific officer in the Bioscience Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), in Mumbai. Her doctoral thesis focused on identifying and validating single nucleotide polymorphism markers in abiotic stress-responsive genes, and identifying stress-induced microRNAs in wheat. Bharati has helped design and develop an Indian wheat database which allows researchers to retrieve information about molecular markers linked to rust resistance genes.
- Yewubdar Ishetu Shewaye, from Ethiopia, works as a wheat breeder for the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research at the Debre Zeit Agricultural Research Center. Her main objectives are to empower the farming community in Ethiopia and other developing nations in the fight against wheat rust diseases, to reduce production costs for resource-poor farmers, and to increase yield.
- Paula Silva, from Uruguay, leads part of the disease resistance breeding program at INIA as well as coordinates the Precision Wheat Phenotypic Platform for Wheat Diseases in collaboration with CIMMYT. She has worked on projects aimed at breeding for barley yellow dwarf and blast resistance by characterizing wild relatives of wheat to search for novel sources of resistance.
- Peipei Zhang, from China, is a researcher at Hebei Agricultural University. For the last decade, her research has focused on wheat rust genetics, specifically on gene discovery and leaf rust resistance in the wheat genome. She hopes to transform her research outcomes to benefit millions of smallholder farmers in China and other countries to reduce wheat loss due to rust diseases.
2020 WIT Mentor Award
- The 2020 WIT Mentor awardee is Evans Lagudah, chief research scientist at CSIRO, Australia, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an adjunct professor at the University of Sydney. Lagudah operates at the interface between agriculture and fundamental molecular research, and his research ensures the rapid translation of new molecular discoveries into practical agriculture in the global grains industry.
DGGW is an international initiative to improve wheat that is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UK aid from the UK government.
More information about the winners can be found at the BGRI website.
