Janila Pasupuleti, a geneticist plant breeder by training has 21 years of work experience in establishing and managing demand-led crop breeding programs in international and national institutes. The high oleic acid peanut lines developed by Janila’s team at ICRISAT are under testing in >10 countries and in partnership with ICAR-DGR, the first high oleic acid peanut varieties were commercialized in India. The peanut breeding program at ICRISAT under her leadership was modernized to use genomic and phenomic tools, rapid generation advancement (RGA) and other innovations to enhance the rate of genetic gain. She is the Cluster Leader of Crop Breeding & Principal Scientist (Groundnut breeding) at ICRISAT. In her role as Cluster Leader she provides leadership to the crop breeding programs in Asia and Africa for six crop commodities, pearl millet, sorghum, finger millet, groundnut, chickpea and pigeon pea. During 2028-21, she was the Flagship Leader of ‘variety and hybrid development’ program for 9 crop commodities of CRP-GLDC. Janila organized training on ‘new crop breeding technologies’ that trained over 100 crop breeders in Africa and Asia during 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023. She mentored 20 research scholars, post-doctoral researchers, and national researchers. She have >75 research papers published. Her areas of expertise are Genetics, demand-led crop breeding, marker-assisted selection, process innovations in crop breeding and testing pipelines, farmer participatory selection.

K Peter Pauls is in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph. His group is studying plant molecular biology related to crop production, especially for dry bean (Phaseolus vulgaris).

Dr Yogendra Kalenahalli is an Indian national with a Ph.D. in Plant Biotechnology from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India. Dr Yogendra's primary research interests encompass CRISPR-Cas9-based gene editing, metabolomics, proteomics, and enhancing plant resistance to biotic stress. Dr Yogendra has effectively employed systems biology methodologies, including metabolomics and proteomics, to unravel the biochemical mechanisms underlying resistance in various plant-pathogen interactions. Dr Yogendra has investigated resistance mechanisms in peanut-Aspergillus pathosystem, potato-Phytophthora infestans, and wheat-Fusarium graminearum interactions. Dr Yogendra also spearheaded a team conducting a systems biology study of transcription factors that regulate plant-pathogen interactions in potato and wheat. Among his achievements, he identified several resistance-related metabolites that reinforce cell walls, enhancing resistance against late blight in potatoes. Before joining ICRISAT, Yogendra held positions as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, University of Adelaide, Australia (2016-2020), and the Department of Plant Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada (2012-2016).