Join Dr. Rony Swennen of IITA for an insightful Zoom seminar entitled “Going bananas with bananas: Breeding a sterile crop for African smallholders” on April 4, 2024 at 11:00 am to 12:00pm EST.
Part of the RTB Breeding program, since February 2013 Dr. Swennen has led the banana breeding program at IITA.
Dr. Rony Swennen obtained his PhD at KU Leuven, Belgium in 1984. After a brief research stay in the Canary Islands, Spain, he joined IITA in 1979 as the first scientist at IITA’s Highrainfall substation, Onne, Nigeria. There he started plantain research initially focusing on physiology in support of agronomy, and taxonomy. He initiated and run the plantain breeding programme that resulted in black sigatoka resistant plantain for which IITA was awarded the International King Baudouin Award. He collected worldwide banana and plantain varieties that laid the basis for the International Transit Centre of banana, Leuven, Belgium. In 1990 he became Senior lecturer at KU Leuven and by 1997 full professor. His Laboratory of Tropical Crop Improvement hosts the world banana collection, now the Alliance of CIAT and Bioversity International, with collaborations in 103 countries. Cryopreservation techniques were developed for banana and later for another 27 plant species. His group developed also the first transgenic bananas in the early 90s with field tests in 2 locations. He is a strong believer in phenotyping and therefore initiated a proteomics and transcriptomics platform. In 1995 he became member of the Royal Academy, Belgium and Honorary Research Fellow of Bioversity International. He received several international awards and a chieftaincy in Nigeria. Since February 2013 he has led the banana breeding program at IITA. The matooke breeding is done in Uganda, the mchare breeding in Tanzania and the plantain breeding in Nigeria. He leads a team of +60 staff.