Dr. Wuletaw Tadesse Degu leads the spring bread wheat breeding program at ICARDA. Before joining the Center in 2010 he worked at CIMMYT as a postdoctoral wheat breeder and in the Ethiopian Agricultural Research Institute as a crop breeder.
Dr. Tadesse’s research focuses on the development of widely adapted and high yielding wheat genotypes with resistance to major biotic (diseases and insects) and abiotic (drought and heat) stresses in sub-Saharan Africa and the Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) region. His program distributes more than 300 elite spring bread wheat genotypes on an annual basis through international nurseries to national agricultural research programs. In the past five years alone, more than 60 ICARDA wheat varieties have been released by national programs in sub-Saharan Africa and CWANA.
Dr. Tadesse has published more than 30 articles in ISI journals, and supervised 15 master’s and Ph.D. students. He received his Ph.D. in plant breeding and genetics from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and his master’s degree from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.