Dr Rakesh K. Srivastava has over 19 years of experience in modern plant breeding and translational genomics. He significantly contributed to genetics, breeding, genomics, and molecular breeding in cross-often-, and self-pollinated crops spanning cereals, legumes, flowers and vegetables straddling the seed industry (Syngenta Seeds) and international organization (ICRISAT). Dr Srivastava leads the global chickpea breeding programs and the pearl millet genomics and molecular breeding team at ICRISAT. Dr Srivastava is extensively involved in the development of new climate-resilient, biotic and abiotic stress-tolerant, nutrient-rich chickpea varieties for major chickpea growing areas of the world. He is also engaged in the generation of cutting-edge genetic and genomic resources, mining, mapping, and deployment of QTLs/genes for various biotic, abiotic, grain and fodder quality-related traits in pearl millet as a global mandate. Dr Srivastava contributed significantly to the development of platinum-grade pearl millet genome assemblies, pangenome analysis for heat tolerance and Milletdb-a multi-omics database platform on millets. Dr Srivastava led a team comprising national and international partners to define the heterotic gene pools in pearl millet for the first time. He also led the sequencing of the pearl millet downy mildew pathogen genome. Dr Srivastava contributed significantly to the development of forward and reverse genetic resources such as the world diversity mapping panel, representing the global pearl millet genetic diversity, mapping populations segregating for biotic, abiotic, and quality-related traits, chromosome segment substitution lines (CSSLs), and TILLING populations. Dr Srivastava contributed to the world reference germplasm Tift23D2B1, 843B and ICMR 06777 for deep sequencing which now serve as world reference genomes for pearl millet. Dr Srivastava has developed mega molecular breeding products such as the HHB 67 Improved 2, an improved version of the popular cultivar HHB 67 Improved, grown in more than 10% (850,000 ha) of the total pearl millet cropped area, touching the lives of more than two million farmers every season. He has won several awards and has over 125 publications to his credit. Dr Srivastava is an alumnus of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi where he earned Ph.D. in Genetics in the year 2004.