François Belzile 

Dr. François Belzile is a professor of Crop Genomics in the Plant Science department at Laval University in Canada. After a B.Sc. in Agronomy at Laval University, he obtained M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Genetics from the University of California at Davis before conducting postdoctoral work at the John Innes Institute in the UK. He then returned to his alma mater to take up his current position where he and his team have been interested in using genomics to develop novel approaches in plant breeding, mainly in soybean and barley. It is in this capacity that he led a team of Canadian and international scientists involved in the SoyaGen project (https://soyagen.ca). He strives to act as a bridge and facilitator between the lab-based genomic sciences and their numerous applications in the development of new and improved crop varieties.