Generation Challenge Program Selects Jean Marcel Ribaut as new director
- Monday, 13 June 2005 00:00
- Published Date
The Search Committee nominated by the Program Steering Committee of the Generation Challenge Program (GCP) is pleased to announce the appointment of Jean Marcel Ribaut to the position of Director of the GCP. Selected from a pool of 37 highly-qualified candidates, Dr. Ribaut’s research experience, management skills, and commitment to the GCP’s mission uniquely qualify him to helm this global program to use the tools of genomics to improve the staple crops of developing countries to alleviate poverty and hunger. 
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13 June 2005
Contact: Jenny Nelson
Telephone: +52 55 5804 2004
Fax: +52 55 5804 2004
Email: j.nelson @cgiar.org
Generation Challenge Program Selects Jean Marcel Ribaut as new director
The Search Committee nominated by the Program Steering Committee of the Generation Challenge Program (GCP) is pleased to announce the appointment of Jean Marcel Ribaut to the position of Director of the GCP. Selected from a pool of 37 highly-qualified candidates, Dr. Ribaut’s research experience, management skills, and commitment to the GCP’s mission uniquely qualify him to helm this global program to use the tools of genomics to improve the staple crops of developing countries to alleviate poverty and hunger.
Trained in plant physiology and genetics at Lausanne University in Switzerland, Dr. Ribaut joined CIMMYT in 1993 as a post-doc in the Biotechnology Program. In 2001, he was appointed Deputy Director of the Applied Biotechnology Program, and in 2004 became the Group Leader for Biotechnology at CIMMYT. During his time at CIMMYT, Dr. Ribaut’s research activities focused on drought tolerance – a major objective of the GCP – and he is now an internationally recognized expert in the field. As Senior Scientist in the Genetic Resources Program, Dr. Ribaut has been in charge of the genetic dissection and marker-assisted selection (MAS) for maize and wheat improvement under abiotic stress conditions and development of new MAS strategies. In collaboration with a number of outside partners, he also pursued activities in metabolites quantification, proteomics, and bioinformatics. In addition to his research expertise and extensive collaborative activities, Dr. Ribaut has been responsible for the capacity building and training of many students and scientists from developing countries. He is also already familiar with the GCP, since he has been involved in the Challenge Program since the earliest stages of its development.
“I joined the CGIAR over a decade ago because I enjoy working in international agriculture very much and I wanted to impact poor farmers’ lives,” he says. “I’m thrilled to join the GCP in this new capacity and use my experience to help shape the important research and capacity building activities of the GCP. It’s a privilege to work with this team of GCP scientists, who are some of the best people working in these fields today and are so enthusiastic about the potential of this program.”
In his first duties as GCP director, Dr. Ribaut envisions consolidating the research agenda to focus on key research themes and to identify a number of flagship projects to prove the concept of the GCP model of using genomics in plant breeding programs to develop and deliver farmer-preferred, stress tolerant varieties faster and more efficiently.
Dr. Ribaut is Swiss-French and is married to Maria de la Luz Lopez Damian. They have three children: Aline (7 years), Yanick (5 years), and Christophe, (10 months). He will be based at CIMMYT with the GCP secretariat. Dr. Ribaut starts at half time with the GCP on 1 July 2005 and full time as GCP director on 1 September 2005. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .
For additional information, please contact Jenny Nelson, GCP communications coordinator (j.nelson @cgiar.org).
The Generation Challenge Program (GCP) uses modern crop science to address the constraints faced by poor farmers. It develops new methods to exploit the genetic diversity in germplasm collections around the world using technologies such as comparative genomics and molecular markers to solve agricultural problems caused by drought and plant diseases. Capacity building and enabling delivery are important elements of the program. The Generation Challenge Program brings together three sets of partners—the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), advanced research institutes (ARIs), and national agricultural research systems (NARS) in developing countries—to deliver the fruits of the Genomics Revolution to resource-poor farmers.
Generation Challenge Programme launches research programme to bring genomics revolution to developing countries
- Published Date
Brisbane, Australia – The Generation Challenge Programme is a new initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to explore plant genetic diversity and create crops that better meet the needs of the resource poor by partnering with a wide range of research organizations and implementing institutions around the world. Download PDF
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jenny Nelson and Dave Poland
Generation Challenge Programmes
Telephone: +52 55 5804 2004
Fax: +52 55 5804 2004
Email: j.nelson @cgiar.org and d.poland @cgiar.org
www.generationcp.org
Generation Challenge Programme launches research programme to bring genomics revolution to developing countries
First public initiative of its kind, the Generation Challenge Programme kicks off its second year of bringing international partners together to propel plant genetic diversity and genomics research forward for the resource poor
Brisbane, Australia – The Generation Challenge Programme is a new initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to explore plant genetic diversity and create crops that better meet the needs of the resource poor by partnering with a wide range of research organizations and implementing institutions around the world.
Launching its second year of research, the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) uses genetic and genomic tools to harness the rich global heritage of plant genetic resources to bring improved stress tolerance to the staple foods of developing countries. For GCP Director Robert Zeigler, the time is ripe to bring biotechnology to bear on the agricultural constraints that plague the poorest farmers, such as drought, pests and diseases, and low soil nutrition.
“In recent years, three simultaneous revolutions have completely changed the way we think about problems and their solutions: revolutions in biology, information management, and communications,” says Zeigler. “Modern biology has enjoyed an explosive growth in knowledge, especially in our understanding of genetics and the creation of the field of genomics—the understanding of how genetic information is stored and processed. This revolution created enormous amounts of data and would not have been possible without the second revolution in data storage and analytical capacity. A very large, sophisticated, and global "distributed" data set has been created, and is accessible around the world thanks to the third revolution in communications technology.
“Add these capabilities to a fourth, but more established resource,” says Zeigler, “the large set of genetic resources collected by CGIAR centers during the past decades, and we now have the capability to produce improved varieties for farmers working in very harsh environments that we only dreamed of a few years ago.
In addition to the window of opportunity these technological revolutions provide, experts around the world are calling for a new generation of global, public research to address the needs of the poorest people in developing countries. In its report The State of Food and Agriculture 2003- 2004, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said, “Public-sector research is necessary to address the public goods that the private sector would naturally overlook and to provide competition in technology markets.” And in their August 2004 editorial, the editors of Scientific American rallied for “an armistice in the war of words over ag-biotech”: “Serious public investment by industrial countries—both at home and in the developing world, to help scientists there build their own research initiatives—could serve both commercial and humanitarian ends.”
The Generation Challenge Programme answers that call and is poised to make real impact by uniting three sets of partners—the CGIAR centers, advanced research institutes (ARIs), and national agricultural research systems (NARS) in developing countries—to deliver on its mission.
The GCP’s research is organized under five subprogrammes that span the spectrum of research in germplasm, genomics, bioinformatics, and molecular breeding for agricultural development. A central principle of the GCP is that our products make it from the lab to resource-poor farmers, so we build strong partnerships with NARS to ensure that their scientists help drive the GCP’s research agenda and that delivery mechanisms are in place. In addition, all of the GCP’s products are released as public goods.
The Generation Challenge Programme aims to drive the revolutions in biology, information management, and communications toward a fourth revolution: a new research paradigm that targets the needs of the world’s poorest people. Through applications of genomics and plant genetic diversity, this Generation strives to make a real difference in the lives of future generations.
