Leadership Program for Plant Breeders & Scientists

Leading and Managing Plant Breeding programs is becoming increasingly complex with all sorts of advancements in technologies, such as Molecular Biology, Genomics, Cell Biology, High-Throughput Phenotyping, and AI, as well as, further segmentation of Markets, e.g., interactions with retailers and consumers become important, just to name a few.

This course is designed to enrich the Leadership and Management skills (usually referred to as “soft skills”) of Plant Breeders and Scientists, technical leads, and their staff. The Breeding Program is considered within its environment, interacting with many stakeholders within and outside the organization. Professionals directing these programs in the Seed Industry, agricultural research, and those from the public sector will benefit from attending this course.

Course Curriculum:

• Plant breeding contribution toward Designing Vision, Crop Strategy, and Breeding Targets
• How plant breeding or research program aligns with the organization's strategy
• Learn to lead and manage employees and stakeholders towards common goals
• Using conflict resolution to handle difficult situations and turn into win-win
• Innovation in plant breeding following or leading?
• Influencing skills and internal stakeholders; research, operations, marketing, sales, labs, production, finance...
• Managing resources within the goals of the organization, can we do more with less?
• Intellectual property in plant breeding, germplasm acquisition, MTA's, national and international treaties, and agreements
• Budget management, controlling and tracking expenses

Core Instructors:

François Lallouet has broad expertise in Vegetable Seeds R&D. He has more than 30 years of experience in several vegetable seed companies: Vilmorin, Royal Sluis, Seminis, Tézier, HM Clause (Limagrain Group). His operational and multidiscipline experience across the globe USA, India, Middle East, China, Holland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and lies in commercial breeding, breeding management, Seed production, product development, marketing, post-merger integration, Partnership for outsourcing, Product range management in several crops’ melon, squash, cucumber, watermelon, pepper, then Breeding strategy, Product development through distributors, Multi environmental trials program, and Market analysis. Having seen Plant Breeding from these different viewpoints, François Lallouet is a successful industry consultant and pays specific attention to the leadership components, where Breeding interactions with the rest of the company and the external environment are key elements of success.

Jaap Hoogstraten has 40 years of experience in Breeding of which  over 35 years in Tomato breeding. A University of Wageningen, the Netherlands graduate , Jaap started his career as a coffee breeder in Brazil with FAO in 1981 and spent another 2 years with them in Morocco as a Phytopathologist.

Jaap is recognized as a successful and passionate tomato breeder with over 400 million USD of total sales during his career. He started his tomato career with Royal Sluis in 1986. Originally based in Nimes, France, he moved to Woodland/Davis, California in 1997 after the acquisition by Seminis. A few years later, he returned back to the Netherlands in 1999 where he continued his tomato breeding work through both Monsanto and Bayer transitions.

One of his most notable contributions is the development of commercially successful hybrids with resistance to the Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl virus (TYLCV). He introgressed resistance from a wild tomato species into hybrids sold worldwide. Beyond his efforts breeding tomatoes, Jaap also has been an active and visible leader, serving as Associate Director Tomato Breeding for several years and mentoring colleagues cross-functionally. From 2019 to 2021, Jaap has worked as EMEA Pipeline Planning and Technology Adoption Lead.

(Teaches Europe only)

Dr. Fred Bliss is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis. As a plant breeder at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and UC Davis, he led improvement programs for cowpea, common bean, tomato, stone fruits, and tree fruit rootstocks. In 1998, he joined Seminis Vegetable Seeds as Director of Worldwide Breeding and held management positions for breeding, technology support, special projects, and corporate planning until 2010. He has been an active participant in research and development projects globally including work in Nigeria, Somalia, Honduras, and Brazil. He is an author or co-author of more than 100 journal articles, and twenty book chapters, and has released germplasm and cultivars of legumes and tree fruits. In 2020, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association for Plant Breeders.

(Teaches Davis only)

Guest Presenters:

Jeff Boettge brings over 35 years of expertise in the vegetable seed industry, with a proven track record of driving innovation and growth. His career includes pivotal leadership roles at BASF Nunhems Vegetable Seeds and Bayer Crop Science Vegetable Seeds, where he led global crop strategies and marketing efforts. Notably, he introduced groundbreaking concepts such as SUNIONS, the world's first tearless onion. His extensive skill set includes marketing strategy, strategic vision, brand development, and sales execution, making him a trusted consultant and leader in the field.

Jan Dirk Geertseema is a management consultant, executive coach, and university lecturer specializing in leadership and organization. JD is the author of the acclaimed management book ‘Human Logic – Cracking the Code of Human Behavior’. 
JD’s expertise results from 25 years of behavior research, several decades of executive coaching and counseling, and hundreds of in-depth interviews with business and government leaders worldwide.
JD and his team successfully serve clients throughout Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia, and government organizations in the USA, The Netherlands, and Ukraine, developing balanced leadership teams, boosting teamwork, and improving employee engagement.
JD is a foreign faculty member at the Kyiv Mohyla Business School in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the UCU Business School in Lviv, Ukraine, and a guest lecturer at Guanghua School of Management in Beijing, China, the California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, CA, USA, and UC Davis Seed Biotechnology Centre in Davis, CA, USA.

Ken Owens comes with over 42 years of experience in Vegetable Breeding. A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate, Ken began his career as a cucumber and pepper breeder with Peto Seed in Woodland, California in 1982.  In 2000 he co-founded Magnum Seeds, a very successful company recognized worldwide for its innovative breeding activities in 8 vegetable classes. During his prolific career, Ken and his team bred many leading varieties for both open-field and protected culture markets. Ken is looking forward to giving back and sharing his experiences with new generations of plant breeders.

Amanda Pappas is a seasoned Organizational Development leader with over eight years of experience in the agriculture industry. As the Global Manager of Organizational Development at HM.CLAUSE, Amanda is dedicated to driving meaningful organizational change and empowering individuals to reach their full potential. She excels at designing and implementing comprehensive development programs, focusing on both organizational effectiveness and individual growth.
Based in Davis, California, Amanda has held a variety of impactful roles at HM.CLAUSE, including Human Resources Business Partner for Sales, Marketing, and Australia, as well as Organizational Development Specialist. In each of these positions, she has been instrumental in shaping the company’s strategic approach to talent management and organizational development.
Prior to her work at HM.CLAUSE, Amanda gained significant experience in the aviation industry as part of JetBlue Airways' Organizational Effectiveness team. She also worked as a Senior Organizational Development Associate at a boutique consulting firm in New York City, where she helped clients improve organizational culture and performance through targeted interventions.
Amanda’s career in organizational development began at UC Santa Cruz, where she served as a Research Assistant in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology department, conducting research on trust in the workplace.
Amanda holds a Master of Arts in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her passion for fostering effective, high-performing teams is matched by her commitment to continuous learning and development in the field of organizational psychology.

John Schoenecker spent over 32 years in the vegetable seed business with stints in sales, product management, marketing, legal, regulatory and intellectual property for HM.CLAUSE and it's legacy companies. John has been active in national and global aspects of the seed business serving as the ASTA (American Seed Trade Association) representative to the vegetable and ornamental section of the International Seed Federation (ISF)  and with the board and as chair of ASTA. John represented ASTA and was involved with developing the AgAccord and testifying to the US Senate to encourage the US to join the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources (ITPGR).

Jovan Djordjevic, Director of Education, Seed Biotechnology Center, UC Davis. Jovan is a seed executive with over 25 years of experience in the field crops and vegetable seed industries. His career began in France in 1996, as a corn breeder for Cargill Seeds (later Monsanto). Jovan continued in Canada as the Canola Breeding Lead for Monsanto, then in California as the R&D Team lead for Bayer/BASF. Throughout his prolific career, he has been a part of over 200 releases of hybrid varieties of corn, canola, tomato, pepper, sweet corn, watermelon, melon, cucumber, onions, carrots, and leek. He is looking forward, together with the SBC team of instructors, to impart his experiences to future generations of plant breeders and other seed industry professionals.

Questions? Contact us at sbc@ucdavis.edu