Dr Shashi Kumar Gupta
Dr Shashi Kumar Gupta
Principal Scientist - Pearl millet Breeding

Dr Shashi Kumar Gupta is an alumnus of CCSHAU, Hisar, Haryana, and has experience in handling breeding programs for about 20 years. He worked on pulse crops, like chickpea, pigeon pea, green gram, and black gram for about 7 years while working at PAU, Ludhiana, Punjab (2000 to 2008) and was involved in the release of about 10 pulse cultivars which are still cultivated in different parts of India. For the last 15 years, Dr Gupta has been working on Pearl millet breeding at ICRISAT, handling seed and restorer parental line development programs. Dr Gupta was the Global Coordinator of the Pearl Millet crop in the BMGF-funded HOPE project from 2010-2015 and coordinated breeding activities of South Asian and West African breeding programs. Dr Gupta was the product line lead and flagship leader for pearl millet in South Asia and Eastern African countries during 2012-2016 in the CGIAR-CRP-Dryland Cereals Global program. Dr Gupta contributed to multiple projects for the development of cultivars and hybrid parents to develop promising cultivars for upscaling on marginal farms in semi-arid tropics. Worked with central Asian countries to identify pearl millet cultivars for salinity-affected areas. While working with many ARIs globally, his team standardized a genomic selection model for pearl millet crop, generated information about heterotic pools in pearl millet, and identified mechanisms of flowering period heat tolerance in pearl millet. Dr Gupta has been instrumental in mainstreaming biofortification traits in the pearl millet breeding pipeline and the development of several multi-cut cultivars with enhanced and improved forage quality. Dr Gupta has been working with about 30 seed companies for about the last 15 years in Consortium mode, shared breeding materials which helped to release pearl millet hybrids in different agro-ecologies across the different regions at the global level. Dr Gupta was a member of the Consortium which sequenced the pearl millet genome, and then the three platinum-grade de-novo reference genome assemblies. He has several academic/research/publications and awards and more than a hundred publications to his credit.