Riyadh, Saudi Arabia– December 2, 2025. CIMMYT and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have formalized a brand new scientific partnership geared toward accelerating crop enchancment by means of cutting-edge bioinformatics, genomics, and data-driven agricultural analysis.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed just about by Bram Govaerts, CIMMYT Director General, and Professor Erwan Arzel, Director, Research Funding and Services at KAUST, establishes a long-term framework for collaborative analysis, capability strengthening, and innovation in assist of resilient, productive, and sustainable food programs.
Building on CIMMYT’s decades-long management in maize and wheat science and KAUST’s globally acknowledged excellence in computational biology and superior analysis infrastructure, the partnership will concentrate on:
- Joint improvement and software of bioinformatics and genomic instruments to speed up breeding improvements.
- Capacity constructing, together with workshops, technical exchanges, and graduate coaching.
- Co-creation of knowledge platforms, requirements, and greatest practices to guarantee interoperability, high quality, and impression.
- Future areas of collaboration aligned with shared scientific priorities and rising global challenges.
“This partnership exemplifies the type of bold, science-driven cooperation needed to deliver resilient crops and sustainable food systems for the future,” stated Bram Govaerts, CIMMYT Director General. “By combining CIMMYT’s mission-driven agricultural research with KAUST’s world-class expertise and regional leadership, we can unlock new innovations that support farmers and food security across the Global South.”
Professor Mark Tester, Chair of the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Food Security, highlighted that “Adapting to environmental change requires truly innovative approaches to food security that account for variable climates and limited water. We must focus on scientific expertise, bring together the brightest minds in the world, and move with pace. This partnership brings together two world-leading institutions with complementary strengths to tackle pressing issues in food security.”
A partnership aligned with regional and global priorities
The collaboration comes at a strategic time, as Saudi Arabia is growing funding in agricultural innovation to improve food system resilience. Recent nationwide initiatives, together with large-scale commitments to analysis, expertise, and sustainability, underscore the area’s ambition to grow to be a global hub for scientific excellence.
This MoU is absolutely according to the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 Strategy, which emphasizes innovation, sustainability, and food security as pillars of nationwide improvement. It additionally formalizes a partnership that has been evolving for greater than a decade, throughout which CIMMYT and KAUST have collaborated informally on analysis exchanges and joint scientific initiatives.
The CIMMYT–KAUST partnership straight helps these efforts by leveraging superior computational analysis, world-leading germplasm sources, and internationally acknowledged breeding platforms. The synergy between KAUST’s scientific ecosystem and CIMMYT’s mission-driven mandate is predicted to drive transformative advances with advantages extending throughout the Gulf, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
This collaboration reinforces CIMMYT’s position as a global pioneer in utilized agricultural science and KAUST’s management as a world-class analysis establishment dedicated to addressing crucial challenges in food security, sustainability, and technological innovation.
About CIMMYT
CIMMYT is a innovative, non-profit, worldwide group devoted to fixing tomorrow’s issues at this time. It is entrusted with fostering improved amount, high quality, and dependability of manufacturing programs and fundamental cereals equivalent to maize, wheat, triticale, sorghum, millets, and related crops by means of utilized agricultural science, notably within the Global South, by means of constructing robust partnerships. This mixture enhances the livelihood trajectories and resilience of hundreds of thousands of resource-poor farmers, whereas working in direction of a extra productive, inclusive, and resilient agrifood system inside planetary boundaries.
Learn extra at www.cimmyt.org.
For extra info:
Nahyane Bakkali, External Communications Manager