Dr. Faouzi Bekkaoui

Dr. Faouzi Bekkaoui is the director of the National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA), Morocco and the scientific director of the Adaptation of African Agriculture initiative (AAA). He was previously director of the school of agriculture and coordinator of the AgroBioSciences research program at the Mohammed 6 Polytechnic University of Benguerir (2017-19). He also worked as executive director of the flagship wheat improvement program at the National Research Council Canada (NRC, 2012-17), at ID Biomedical in the field of DNA diagnostics, at GenServe as laboratory manager in the area of plant diagnostics, at Genome Prairie as project manager and at the NRC Plant Biotechnology Institute as postdoctoral fellow in the field of molecular biology and genomics.  During his career, he has co-authored 40 scientific articles in various fields including DNA diagnostics, molecular biology, genomics and plant physiology. He holds three US patents in molecular diagnostics.  Dr. Bekkaoui holds a BSc degree in physiology from the University of Tours and a PhD in plant physiology from the Sorbonne University (formerly Paris VI).