GCP Genotyping Support Service grantee wins award

One of the grantees in the Generation Challenge Programme  Genotyping Support Service (GSS) scheme, AbduRahman Beshir Issa, was recently honoured at the annual postgraduate symposium of Botany and Plant Biotechnology at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa.

AbduRahman, who is also a CIMMYT PhD fellow, bagged the Gold Medal, PhD category, for 2012 for his PhD project presentation entitled ‘Quality protein maize: Towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals through better nutrition and stable yields’. The standards for selection were – among others – the significance of the project, the quality of the content, and delivery.

AbduRahman, who undertook his postgraduate studies in Plant Breeding at the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS),  is the co-author of a book entitled Farmers, seeds and varieties: Supporting informal seed supply in Ethiopia. The book, published in the Netherlands, addresses strategies and approaches through which professionals working in seed sector development, crop improvement and genetic resources management, or more generally in research and extension, can support informal seed supply in Africa. His MSc thesis was entitled Genotype by Environment Interaction and Yield Stability of Maize Hybrids Evaluated in Ethiopia.

The UJ symposium is an annual platform at which selected postgraduate students from different universities present their research findings. AbduRahman is a grantee in our 3rd GSS call.