Kirstin Bett is Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate level in plant breeding and plant genetics. She is responsible for a common bean breeding program that has released several varieties targeted at the short season growing regions of western Canada. She has also established a complementary genetics program that uses classical and molecular techniques to better understand the traits that lead to the development of superior pulse crop cultivars. This has included work in seed quality, disease resistance and flowering time and has extended to the use of wild species as a source of useful variability. She has been involved in the development of genomic resources for lentil and common bean including leading the effort to sequence genomes of lentil and its wild relatives. She is currently wrapping up a Genome Canada project focused on the genetics of seed quality traits in lentil - a natural progression from her previous Genome Canada grant on domestication and adaptation in lentil. Her third Genome Canada project has just started and focuses on the genetics underlying the value of lentil to rotations with wheat in western Canada