Morag is a plant molecular geneticist with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). She works mainly on cassava, particularly in relation to genetic diversity, tolerance to cassava brown streak disease (CBSD) and drought tolerance. She is now applying the newly available cassava genome sequence to issues of cassava conservation and utilisation in Africa. She has a strong interest in capacity building and has worked with many MSc. and PhD students since she arrived at the ILRI-BecA hub in 2002. 

Morag is originally from South Africa, but completed her BSc. (Hons) in Crop and Soil Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Through DfID’s ‘Associate Professional Officer’s Scheme’ she completed her MSc. at the University of Birmingham in ‘Conservation and Utilisation of Plant Genetic Resources’. She conducted her PhD research at the Genetic Resources Unit, ICARDA, Syria where she studied the diversity of wild Lens species. Morag joined ICRISAT in India for her post-doc studies and developed SSR markers for groundnut diversity assessment. She relocated to ILRI-BecA in 2002 and joined IITA in 2003 to initiated molecular marker based applications for crop improvement. Since then she has worked on marker development, diversity assessments, QTL mapping and marker-assisted breeding in various crops including cowpea, yam, banana and cassava. She looks forward to applying and expanding her understanding of molecular markers to address constraints to agriculture production in Africa.