JOB DETAILS:
The Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT delivers research-based solutions that harness agricultural biodiversity and sustainably transform food systems to improve people’s lives. Alliance solutions address the global crises of malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation.

The Alliance works with local, national, and multinational partners across Sub Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and Asia, and with public and private sectors. The Alliance is part of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future, dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services.

Background of the position
The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT have initiated a project, titled Artemis. Artemis is developing AI technology to enable on-farm breeding. Crop breeding is one of the foundations of agriculture, under the current breeding systems a common assumption is that it takes 10 years to develop a new variety. Given the pace of climate change this timeframe is no longer viable. New approaches are needed to speed up the breeding cycle and enable a greater synchrony between plant breeding and on-farm conditions, shifting breeding from a majority on-station to majority on-farm process. Artemis is addressing this issue by leveraging the power of technology to enable breeding programs with a new generation of AI-powered and smartphone-deployable tools. The principal technology is computer vision phenotyping, with explorations into multimodal data that integrates speech and text to actively integrate farmers into the plant improvement process. Artemis is currently in the second investment phase, having been featured recently in Reuters.

About the position
The Lead Sustainable Innovation & Transformation will be responsible for setting strategic vision and leading execution to transition Artemis from a research project and into a mature service, potentially expanding the use case beyond breeding and into other related applications. In the short-term they will expand the operational regions within East Africa and over the longer-term develop partner networks to expand into other regions across Africa and the Global South. They will also be responsible for crafting systems transformation strategy to integrate Artemis as a core breeding system for public breeding programs in the Global South, guiding future investment opportunities.

We are seeking for a candidate with a formal background in one or more of the following areas:
• Development, adoption, and scaling of agriculture innovations.
• Agricultural for development project conceptualization, acquisition, and implementation.
• Agricultural or related sciences; business development. The prospective candidate must have demonstrated experience in strategy and implementation of agricultural development projects.

Key Responsibilities
• Leads and implements Artemis as a breeding service projects from inception to execution, aligning plans, capacity, and outcomes in response to organizational and donor priorities.
• Design the strategy to leverage Artemis technologies to expand the use-cases beyond breeding.
• Desing and implement strategic vision on future phases of Artemis investment to drive new market penetration and existing market saturation.
• Lead in the collaboration with the product development and user research teams to leverage UI/UX as a means to achieve sustainable and responsible scale.
• Lead the development and implementation of crafting marketing and branding strategy.
• Develop and leverage critical network connections to integrate Artemis into public breeding programs targeting the Global South.
• Position Artemis as a transformative project in international fora and communities of practice.
• Contribute to learning of the Alliance on scaling and transformation.
• Lead and implement the translation of research findings into peer-reviewed publications.
• Advises leadership and teams and external stakeholders of research projects progress and any emerging issues that can impact the delivery of the projects.
• Supervise and mentors other research staff to build scientific capacity within the organization.

Required qualifications and experience.
• PhD in agriculture and related fields
• Demonstrated experience in the planning and execution of international development projects related to agriculture.
• Demonstrated experience developing and working with digital technologies for agriculture.
• Demonstrated experience working with multidisciplinary teams.
• Demonstrated experience with design and execution of agricultural research trials, including on-station and on-farm applications.
• Demonstrated experience working with the private sector and non-profit communities.
• Excellent professional English communication skills. Knowledge of other languages (e.g., Spanish, French, Swahili) is desirable, but not required.
• Proven scientific English writing skills.
• Previous working experience in Africa and the global south is preferred, but not a strict requirement.