Limagrain Europe & INRA/SupAgro (France)

From June 2015 to October 2016, I worked as a Research Associate with Limagrain Europe and INRA-SupAgro in Montpellier, France, leading a major European-scale project on drought, nitrogen, and heat stress typologies in wheat. This role required coordinating multi-institutional collaborations across Europe, linking crop modelling, agronomy, and data engineering to support both research and breeding applications. I provided scientific and technical leadership on the Limagrain-INRA/SupAgro project, worked with the AgMIP community in a global model intercomparison inititive, and contributed to strengthening Europe-wide capability in climate-impact assessment. My leadership ensured the successful integration of modelling, field knowledge, and analytics to guide strategic decisions such as trial-network placement and future adaptation priorities.

Technically, I designed and implemented a comprehensive R-SQL simulation and analysis framework to investigate abiotic and nitrogen stress effects on wheat performance across more than 8,000 locations and 25,000 simulation units spanning 1984–2014. I enhanced the SiriusQuality crop model by improving its interface, automating crop-management routines, and developing new stress indices to capture climatic and physiological responses. My work included running large-scale simulations across Europe, applying clustering and trend-analysis methods to characterise environmental variability, and developing an Excel-based decision-support tool to optimise multi-environment trial design. In parallel, I built robust ETL and data-warehousing pipelines in R, Python, and SQL to manage continental-scale weather (NetCDF), soil (raster and Access), and agronomic datasets (CSV, Excel), created an R package to standardise modelling and visualisation workflows and enable reproduction of results, and produced publication-ready spatial outputs using R 'graphics' and 'ggplot2' packages and ArcGIS. I also contributed to the SiriusQuality codebase in C#, supporting model enhancement and ensuring alignment with Limagrain breeder and research needs.

Projects