Catherine Feuillet

Catherine Feuillet (; born July 1965) is a French geneticist who is currently the Chief Scientific Officer of [https://inari.com Inari Agriculture], a Cambridge MA based biotechnology company. Feuillet earned a PhD in plant molecular biology on the isolation and characterization of genes involved in wood formation in eucalyptus trees. She started to work on the genetics of disease resistance in wheat in 1994 during her post-doctoral studies at the [https://www.ias.ethz.ch/ Swiss Federal Institute for Agroecology]. She then moved as a junior group leader to the University of Zurich where she investigated the molecular basis of fungal disease resistance in wheat and in barley and cloned the first leaf rust resistance gene from wheat. In 2004 she was hired as a research director at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in France to lead European and international projects on wheat genomics.

In 2008, she and her team successfully published the first mapping of the largest wheat chromosome, 3B and in 2014, they were also the first to publish the full sequence of this chromosome as well as a first reference sequence of the entire wheat genome together with the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium ([https://www.wheatgenome.org/ IWGSC]).

Feuillet was part of the founding members and served as a co-chair of the IWSGC from 2005-2018. In 2013, she joined Bayer Crop Science the Head of Trait Research to lead the discovery and validation of genes to improve soybean, cotton, canola, and wheat yield and tolerance to biotic stresses. She was honored as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and has been awarded the Prix Foulon from the French Academy of Science, the science award of the Femmes en or, and the Jean Dufrenoy Prize from the Académie d'Agriculture of France. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Provided by Wikipedia