When citizen science strengthens breeding: Award-winning research provides new evidence of tricot’s social impact
When farmers participate in crop breeding as citizen scientists, their knowledge and experience can shape which varieties are advanced and released. But participation can also strengthen farmers’ own knowledge, agency and leadership...
- Science
- Tricot
- smallholder farmers
When farmers participate in crop breeding as citizen scientists, their knowledge and experience can shape which varieties are advanced and released. But participation can also strengthen farmers’ own knowledge, agency and leadership—capacities that can, in turn, make breeding and variety dissemination more effective.
This reinforcing relationship is at the heart of the research of Dr Bolanle Oyindamola Adebayo, whose Virginia Tech dissertation, Exploring Participation in Citizen Science for Leadership Identity Development and Food Systems Leadership: A Case Study of Tricot, received the 2026 Association of Leadership Educators Conference Outstanding Dissertation Award. The Association of Leadership Educators (ALE) is a professional association bringing together scholars, educators, and practitioners to advance leadership education through research and practice. The award therefore recognizes the dissertation within the broader professional field of leadership education, placing research conducted through IITA’s tricot work within a wider community of leadership scholars, educators, and practitioners.
The recognition followed the dissertation’s selection by Virginia Tech’s Department of Agricultural Leadership and Community Education (ALCE), within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, as its Outstanding Dissertation among departmental submissions for 2025. It was subsequently nominated for Virginia Tech’s university-wide Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Social Science, Business, Education, and Humanities category.