Catherine Feuillet, PhD

“We are totally embracing the complexity of the challenge – the complexity of nature and biology, and inspired by the diversity of solutions that nature is actually providing us.”

Catherine Feuillet is the CSO of Inari Agriculture and research director and leader of the group “Structure, function and evolution of the wheat genomes” at the INRA, Clermont-Ferrand (France).

After her education she moved to the group of Beat Keller in Switzerland and after three years of postdoctoral studies at the Swiss Federal Institute for Agroecology in Zurich, she was hired as Junior group Leader at the University of Zurich (Institute of Plant Biology) where she continued to develop projects on the genomics of disease resistance and the evolution of the wheat and barley genomes. In 2004, she was appointed by the INRA as research director in Clermont-Ferrand (UMR Genetics, Diversity and Ecophysiology of Cereals) to lead and develop wheat genomics projects. She is one of the co-chairs of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC), the International Triticeae Mapping Initiative (ITMI), and the European Triticeae Genomics Initiative (ETGI).

In 2013, Catherine joined Bayer CropScience as the head of Trait Research until April 2018 when she joined Inari, a start-up aiming at transforming plant breeding as Chief Scientific Officer.

Feuillet earned her PhD in plant molecular biology at the University Paul Sabatier.