Rodomiro Ortiz

Rodomiro Ortiz (Lima, Perú; 1958) is Faculty Professor and Chair of Genetics and Plant Breeding at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), and SLU Breeding Network Chairman. He holds a PhD in Plant Breeding & Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and worked as young researcher at UNALM (Perú), Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP, Perú) and Rutgers University, was scientist and director of various CGIAR Centers (CIMMYT. ICRISAT, IITA), and held a Nordic professorship on plant genetic resources at the then Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University of Denmark (merged thereafter with the University of Copenhagen). Professor Ortiz has written ca. 1000 reports, of which about 50% are journal articles or edited book chapters with h-index of 75, i-10 index 359 and cited by 23099 [as per Google Scholar on 2023.08.11]. The CGIAR awarded to IITA the prestigious 1994 King Baudouin Award for the multidisciplinary research of the team working in plantain and banana improvement, in which he was program leader. In 2012, Plant Breeding Reviews dedicated him its volume 36. Professor Ortiz was the principal investigator of SLU/ICARDA–led research development partnership project Adapting durum wheat varieties to the Senegal Basin for food security that won the 2017 Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security. He was given the Bertebos Prize 2022 for mastering the use of new molecular scientific methods to be a driving force in the breeding of crops of great importance for food supply in Africa, America and Europe. Professor Ortiz was member of CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council (ISPC, 2015–2019) and of the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification (CoSAI, 2020–2021), international fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry (KSLA) since 2019, member of the Royal Physiographic Society at Lund (KFS) from 2021 onwards, and fellow of the African Academy of Sciences (FAAS) since 2021.