CGIAR Research Program Directors

Dr Sobhana (Shoba) Sivasankar is based at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India. Prior to her current assignment, Shoba was the Leader of the Corn Drought Tolerance Gene Evaluation program with Pioneer Hi-Bred International (a DuPont Business) in Johnston, Iowa, where she led an effort for the improvement of transgenic drought tolerance in maize. During her career at DuPont Pioneer, she worked in the areas of stress physiology and silage digestibility, and played an integral part in the development of DuPont’s FASTcorn phenotyping platform.

Born in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Shoba earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in agricultural sciences/agronomy from Kerala Agricultural University. After working as faculty in her Alma Mater from 1983 to 1990, Shoba moved to Canada for higher studies and received her PhD from the University of Guelph in 1995, working in the areas of plant physiology and biochemistry. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the same university in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and moved to DuPont Pioneer in 1999. Her most recent degree is an MBA from the University of Iowa in 2007.

Shoba has 9 issued patents and 43 pending applications across 12 patent families, 10 noteworthy awards and grants, is affiliated with six professional organizations, and has published over 13 research papers.