PhD student Xuecai Zhang from CIMMYT-China was recently awarded a 2009 fellowship from the International Fund for Agricultural Research (IFAR). Zhang was given USD 11,000 to work on the integration of marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) in conventional maize breeding at CIMMYT.
Headquartered in the USA, IFAR is a public nonprofit that recognizes and promotes scientific excellence involving the work of centers in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and their partners. It gives priority to professional development of scientists from Africa and South Asia.
This is the third year in a row that a scientist from CIMMYT-China has been granted an IFAR fellowship; in 2008, IFAR supported Changbin Yin to study the use of chromosome segment substitution lines in genetic study and plant breeding, and in 2007 Huihui Li was granted a fellowship for the genetic study of quantitative traits in breeding.
