Theerayut Toojinda completed his Ph.D. in Crop Science from the Oregon State University, USA in 1998. He has accumulated expertise in the field of plant breeding for almost 30 years. His expertise is in the field of genome mapping in plants, molecular breeding, gene identification and positional gene cloning.

 

Theerayut is the best known rice breeder in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS), particularly Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. His research is centered on the use of marker aided selection (MAS) to improve the effectiveness and precision of conventional rice breeding with the goal to improve tolerance to unfavorable environmental conditions and resistance to pests and diseases. He and his research team developed rice varieties which are flood-tolerant jasmine rice (Homcholasit), blast-resistant glutinous rice (Thanyasirin).