Dr. Catherine Cullingham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Carleton University. She received her BSc from the University of Guelph, earned her PhD at Trent University, and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of Alberta. Her research uses landscape genetics and population genomics to fill knowledge gaps and develop tools that can be applied to issues in forestry and wildlife management. She has been working on the mountain pine beetle system for over 10 years, and has contributed to confirming host-expansion to jack pine, redefining the spatial complexity of the lodgepole x jack pine hybrid zone, and identifying genetic markers potentially associated with MPB resilience.

Sylvie received her B.Sc. in Agronomy from Université Laval (1987), M.Sc. in Plant Science from University of Guelph (1990) and Ph.D. in Biology from Université de Montréal (1994). She joined AAFC’s Cereal Research Centre in Winnipeg in 1995, first as a Visiting Fellow and then as a Research Scientist prior to moving to the Ottawa Research and Development Centre as a Principal Research Scientist in 2014. Dr. Cloutier’s research focuses on genetics, genomics and epigenetics of wheat and flax. She currently leads a pre-breeding program in wheat to identify new sources of resistance for FHB, leaf rust, stripe rust and powdery mildew from wild relatives using genome-wide markers, GWAS and genomic selection approaches. She coordinates a national phenotyping program in both winter and spring Triticum and Aegilops species. She co-led the TUFGEN (flax) large scale Genome Canada project (2009-2014) and she is currently co-leading a second one called 4DWheat (2019-current). She has published more than 115 scientific publications and 12 book chapters. She is an adjunct professor at the Universities of Ottawa and Guelph where she currently supervises 4 PhD and 2 MSc students. She was awarded the Rosemary Davis award in 2013 for leadership in Agriculture and recently received the 2021 Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Gene Stewardship group award for her contribution to the sustainability of rust resistance in wheat. Throughout her career, she has mentored more than 100 individuals including Visiting Scholars, Post-docs, Graduate, undergraduate and high-school students.