Peter Selby has a BS in Software Engineering from Clarkson University. He has industry experience in all aspects of enterprise software development including design, UI development, backend development, dev ops, testing and project management. As BrAPI Coordinator, Peter is responsible for maintaining the BrAPI project and organizing the BrAPI community. He is the primary developer making enhancements to the BrAPI specification and the main point of contact for anyone who has questions or concerns about BrAPI. He also promotes the usage of BrAPI across organizations and is available to help architect and design solutions for passing plant breeding data between systems.
Mahlet Anche has a BS in animal sciences from Hawassa University, Ethiopia, and MS and PhD animal breeding and genetics from Wageningen University, The Netherlands. She did 2 years of Postdoctoral study in Aarhus University. Her interest lies in quantitative genetics of animals and plants, shifting more to plants. Currently, she is a postdoc working on the genetic analysis of end-of-season traits in Maize using phenotypic, GBS and remote sensing data
Francisco is a software developer with experience in Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Computational Biology in both Biomedical and Agricultural settings. He has a B.S. in Physics Applied to Electronics from the University of Puerto Rico-Humacao and a M.S. in Biophysics and Computational Biology from the Ohio State University. Francisco is passionate about science in general and maintains interests in Data Science and Statistics. As part of his previous work, he built pipelines for genomic data analysis, and web applications for a variety of stakeholders across different areas of Biology. He is currently a software developer in the Breeding Informatics team within the Innovation Lab For Crop Improvement.
Biructawit Tessema is a postdoctoral associate in the Robbins lab. She has bachelor’s degree in horticultural science from Jimma University and Master’s in Applied Genetics from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Her PhD from Wageningen University focused on genetic dissection of drought tolerance traits in potato. She has experience in QTL mapping, genomic prediction, and breeding scheme optimization for multiple crops. Biructawit worked as postdoctoral researcher at Center for Quantitative Genetics and Genomics, Aarhus University. Her current work is focused on genomic prediction model development and implementation in hybrid canola, as wells as development of simulation models to optimize canola breeding programs through the application of genomic selection.
David Hickok is from Ames Iowa and obtained a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State University in Agronomy and Global Resource Systems with a Computer Science minor. While at Iowa State he participated in projects and an internship in Uganda focusing on cowpea. His master’s is in Plant Science from Tennessee State University, where he studied the effects of aluminum toxicity on root development in cowpea. Currently his research focus is on open pollinated populations of apple through the labs of Dr. Kelly Robbins and Dr. Awais Khan.
Ranjita Thapa is a postdoctoral associate in Robbins lab. She has a bachelor’s degree in Agriculture from University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India. She completed her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, College station. During her Ph.D. she focused on identification of candidate genes underlying abiotic stress tolerance in rice using quantitative genetics, genomics and transcriptomics approaches. She has experience on Genome-wide association study (GWAS), genome assembly, variant calling and machine learning. In her current role, she is using advanced statistical models and quantitative genetics to estimate genetic parameters, and to model complex genotype-by-environment interactions and development curves in many important crops including alfalfa, wheat, maize, cotton, and soybean using proximal sensing data.
Jose Moreno-Amores has got Master studies in Spain in Bioinformatics and Data Analysis. He received his doctorate at BOKU University in Vienna, Austria. His doctoral thesis explored new approaches to incorporate additional variables to genomic predictions of Fusarium Head Blight in wheat. Jose’s current research interests are related to optimization of Rice breeding strategies in cooperation with Dr. Adam Famoso’ group at Louisiana State University LSU.
Robbins Lab Alumni
