Catherine Feuillet
France | Wheat Genomics
Catherine Feulliet’s work impacts agriculture in a multitude of ways, from advancing society’s genomic understanding of wheat to using pioneering gene-editing tools to help ensure food security for a growing global population while better caring for our planet. In 2004, she joined the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in France as a research director and initiated her work on sequencing the bread wheat genome, with the aim of decrypting the largest wheat chromosome (3B). The wheat genome is five times larger than the human genome, and Feuillet and her team became the first to establish a physical map of chromosome 3B. This work led to the launch of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, an invaluable collaboration platform. Today, she is Chief Scientific Officer at Inari, a company working to solve the critical issues of food security and sustainability by designing nature-positive seeds.