David Omar Gonzalez Dieguez is a Post-Doctoral Fellow – Molecular Pre-Breeder in the Global Wheat Program at CIMMYT. He leads the application and integration of molecular tools in research and pre-breeding activities in wheat physiology.
In the research context, Dieguez focuses on the genetic basis of physiological traits related to yield components and climate resilience for yield potential, heat, and drought adaptation by performing GWAS analyses for gene/marker/QTL discovery and establishing marker validation for pre-breeding and breeding application to assist stacking of complementary physiological and agronomic traits.
In the pre-breeding context, Dieguez conducts the application and integration of genomic-assisted breeding tools (i.e. MAS/MABC and GS) at appropriate stages of the pre-breeding pipeline to support pre-breeder’s decisions for selecting lines for yield potential and tolerance to heat and drought stress and for trait introgression.