Francisco Piñera has a multidisciplinary background in biology, crop production and crop physiology. He joined CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program in 2016.
Piñera’s research focuses on identifying traits and developing genetic resources for increased lodging resistance in wheat. He also coordinates collaborative activities with Mexican partners to develop new germplasm for wheat growing areas in Mexico.
Francisco Pinto is a remote sensing specialist with a background in agronomy and plant physiology. He is in charge of the high-throughput phenotyping platforms in the Global Wheat Program.
Pinto’s research focuses on the use remote sensing and image processing techniques for field phenotyping of wheat, aiming at improving genetic gains in yield and quantifying physiological traits. He is also interested in using remote sensing for understanding ecophysiological dynamics of crops at different spatio-temporal scales.
Carolina Rivera is a wheat physiologist focused on the identification of novel anatomical stem traits associated with increases in harvest index. As a success case of the MasAgro-CIMMYT PhD program herself, she is responsible of the capacity building component of MasAgro Trigo.
In her role as IWYP Data Coordinator, Rivera manages the CIMMYT-IWYP Wheat Germinate database that hosts the most relevant outputs of the IWYP project and the IWYP Hub. She also leads the improvement of phenotypic data workflows in the Wheat Physiology group.
Carolina Saint Pierre is the Partner Network Coordinator for CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program (GWP).
She has oversight of wheat international nurseries seed preparation and shipments, database representation, and resource allocation for the International Wheat Improvement Network. She is responsible for research agenda, sub-grant agreements, activity progress and reporting, training, and interactions with NARS and other institutions to generate high-quality phenotypic data on particular traits on field-based phenotyping platforms.
She fosters strong interactions with NARS and other institutions to maximize the use of high-quality phenotypic data and actively participates in ensuring and implementing an efficient data workflow and availability of data within CIMMYT and to partners. She represents GWP as Enterprise Breeding System Business Change Manager.
Diego Pequeno is a wheat crop modeler based within the Sustainable Agrifood Systems (SAS) program. He also works on a number of projects in collaboration with CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program and a number of external organizations.
His work focuses mainly on the simulation of trait impact scenarios to guide breeding towards the most effective traits and trait combinations for global wheat production. He also works to determine the importance of a single trait or the best combination of traits under different climate change scenarios for different cropping systems in key wheat growing regions. He uses high-performance computer clusters to run gridded crop model simulations for current and future climate scenarios on a global scale.
P.H. Zaidi joined CIMMYT in 2007, and has since focused on strengthening the abiotic stress-tolerant germplasm base relevant for the Asian region. He has led efforts to develop abiotic maize germplasm tolerant to stresses including heat, drought, water-logging and anaerobic germination. He has also developed and standardized screening phenotyping techniques, protocols and selection criterion for various abiotic stresses, and supported NARS partners in implementing these into their programs.
Zaidi played a key role in strengthening collaborative research activities between CIMMYT and Asian NARS, as well as initiating research collaborations with new partners in the region. He has organized training courses on abiotic stress breeding and precision phenotyping, and has received several awards for his contributions to maize research, including CIMMYT’s Outstanding Scientist Award in 2009.
Matthew Reynolds develops and transfers technologies to increase productivity of wheat cropping systems worldwide, primarily focusing on less developed countries. At CIMMYT he’s helped create a new generation of advanced lines based on physiological breeding approaches to widen the wheat genepool, increase understanding of yield potential and adaptation of wheat to drought and heat stress, develop high throughput phenotyping methodologies and train other researchers.
To further these goals, Reynold’s is developing global collaborations to tap into the expertise of plant scientists worldwide, such as the International Wheat Yield Partnership, and coordinates the formation of the Heat and Drought Wheat Improvement Consortium. He’s also leading the community of practice on crop modeling for the CGIAR Big Data platform.
Reynolds has published widely in the area of crop physiology and genomics, and mentored graduate students through affiliations with universities worldwide.
Jill Cairns is a physiologist whose current research is largely focused on the development, validation and deployment of new phenotyping tools to increase maize breeding efficiency. She is also part of a team validating new seed production technologies for Africa.
These technologies are critical to increasing genetic gain within breeding programs, which is essential to meet future food security. Low cost, high-throughput phenotyping tools can increase the accuracy of traits currently measured visually within breeding programs and the development of cheaper tools to measure key traits will allow breeders to divert more resources towards the generation and management of a larger population, thereby increasing selection intensity.
Cairns currently leads a component of the Stress Tolerant Maize for Africa project on innovative breeding tools and techniques to increase the rate of genetic gain in the maize breeding pipeline, and is the cluster of activities leader for Climate Resilient Maize for Africa under MAIZE, a CGIAR Research Program.