RAGT is a French breeding company based in Rodez near Toulouse with a breeding and research site, and a successful commercial business in the UK. The company has a multi-crop portfolio and a leading position in cereal varieties in the European market.

If you have a strong interest in plant pathology to help global plant breeding efforts, we have an exciting opportunity to join our international plant breeding and research teams, as a Plant Breeding Pathologist. This position is a full-time, permanent role working 37.0 hours per week with flexibility to work additional hours as required. The role is based at Ickleton, near Cambridge, UK, with some national and international travel.

Your prime responsibilities will be:
• Interact with cereal breeding and pre-breeding leads globally to develop and implement disease resistance breeding strategies for cereals
• Introduce new resistance sources, and other traits of interest, to elite wheat varieties through the RAGT trait introgression... programme
• Identification of molecular markers for key diseases in conjunction with genotyping, statistical and breeding teams
• Manage trials and breeding nurseries to establish resistance to both biotic and abiotic stresses in cereal breeding programmes
• Manage trials to establish the disease resistance status of submissions to official European and UK registration trials
• Analyse data, produce reports and give presentations at external meetings as necessary
• Participate in external research collaborations in plant pathology
• Monitor academic research in biotic and abiotic stress resistance. Contribute to the translation of research into breeding programmes
• Manage service functions provided by the Cereal Pathology team including: inoculum production, laboratory tests for plant variety registration and sampling and selection for marker-assisted selection programmes
• Leadership of the Cereal Pathology team.

Your primary skills:
• PhD in Plant Science with a specialisation in Plant Pathology, or equivalent experience
• Knowledge and practical experience of cereal pathogens, trial design and statistics, field experimentation and disease scoring, development and use of molecular markers. Experience of cereal breeding is preferred but not essential
• Good organisational skills and the ability to lead a dedicated team
• Proficient in MS Office - Excel, Word, PowerPoint. Experience with utilising databases for storage of large volumes of data is preferred but not essential
Saffron Walden UK

Salary Criteria