Associate Scientist- Pigeonpea Breeding, Eastern and Southern Africa

ICRISAT seeks applications from dynamic Indian nationals for Associate Scientist to support ICRISAT’s pigeonpea breeding team under Global Research Program Accelerated Crop Improvement – Crop Breeding. This position is based at ICRISAT – Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya.

ICRISAT is a non-profit, non-political organization that conducts agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners throughout the world. Covering 6.5 million square kilometers of land in 55 countries, the semi- arid or dryland tropics has over 2 billion people and 644 million of these are the poorest of the poor. ICRISAT and its partners help empower these disadvantaged populations to overcome poverty, hunger and a degraded environment through better agricultural production systems.

ICRISAT is headquartered at Patancheru near Hyderabad, India, with two regional hubs and eight country offices in sub-Saharan Africa. ICRISAT envisions a prosperous, food-secure and resilient dryland tropics. Its mission is to reduce poverty, hunger, malnutrition and environmental degradation in the dryland tropics. ICRISAT conducts research on its mandate crops of chickpea, pigeonpea, groundnut, sorghum, pearl millet and finger millet in the arid and semi-arid tropics. The Institute focuses its work on the drylands and in protecting the environment. Tropical dryland areas are usually seen as resource-poor and perennially beset by shocks such as drought, thereby trapping dryland communities in poverty and hunger and making them dependent on external aid. Please visit – www.icrisat.org

Duties and Responsibilities:

§  Handle field breeding activities including population development in Pigeonpea for Eastern and Southern Africa

§  Support in developing new proposals, project management.

§  Summarize, and interpret the data of the experiments; prepare reports for donors and

§  Publish research papers in the reputed journals.

§  Establish seed stocks and seed productions for multi locational trials in the region.

§  Assist Pigeonpea breeding teams to manage the speed breeding and generation advancement.

§  Any responsibilities assigned by the supervisor.

Requirement:

·         PhD in Genetics and Plant Breeding

·         One-two year of postdoctoral experience in Pigeonpea/pulse breeding

·         Knowledge of pulse crop and breeding strategies

·         Sound knowledge of developing breeding experiments and generation advancement techniques through speed breeding in Pigeonpea

·         Experience in Field experimentation (Field layout, field book), data analysis and interpretation (GENSTAT, R and SAAS).

·         Good English, communication and writing skills

·         Proficiency in computers skills MS-office

·         Team management and crisis-handling skills

General:

 This is a contractual role for a period of 36 months (3 years).