Dr. P. M. Priyadarshan is a prominent Hevea rubber breeder. He commenced his research career by breeding triticale and wheat. He joined the Rubber Research Institute of India (Rubber Board, Ministry of Commerce, Govt. of India) in 1990 and specialized in breeding Hevea rubber under sub-optimal environments. In 2009, he became the Deputy Director of the institute, and managed its Central Experiment Station till 2016. As a scientist, he has been involved in breeding cereals, spices and rubber for the past 36 years. He has published several research papers and chapters in journals and books of international repute. He was a visiting scientist at the Hardwood Tree Improvement and Regeneration Center of Purdue University, United States. He currently works as a freelance consultant in Hevea management and is involved in authoring and editing books on agriculture/life sciences with a global perspective.
Dr. Rodomiro Ortiz (Lima, Perú; 1958) is currently working as a 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 and Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and worked as a young researcher at UNALM (Perú), Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP, Perú) and Rutgers University. He was a 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 60% are journal articles or edited book chapters with h-index of 80. Prof. Ortiz was a 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.