Dr. Offiong Ukpong Edet

MBBS (Sydney), FRACS (Paediatric Surgery)

Dr. Offiong Ukpong Edet started his career in University of Calabar as an Assistant Lecturer in April, 2013 and was upgraded to the rank of Lecturer II in March 2019. He is a developing Plant Breeder and Geneticist, with keen interest in alien introgression breeding, molecular cytogenetics and marker-assisted selection. He obtained his B. Agric. (Hons) degree in Crop Science and M.Sc. degree in Plant Genetics from University of Calabar (Nigeria) in 2004 and 2012, respectively, and PhD in Molecular Breeding from Tottori University (Japan) in 2019. As part of his PhD research, he developed Leymus racemosus and L. mollis genome-wide markers and applied Leymus-specific markers to identify and characterize Leymus chromosomes in wheat–Leymus introgression lines. Combining L. mollis chromosome-specific markers and genomic in situ hybridization, he produced and characterized 10 wheat–L. mollis addition lines, plant materials with high potential for management of biotic and abiotic stresses in bread wheat. Following his outstanding PhD activities, he won Japanese Student Services Organization scholarship from April 2016 – March 2019. His key areas of strength include, but not limited to, comparative genomics, wide hybridization, fluorescence in situ hybridization, genotyping and phenotyping. He lectures courses in plant breeding, statistics, cytology, genetics and biotechnology at undergraduate and graduate levels and has successfully supervised final year undergraduate students’ research projects at Department of Crop Science, University of Calabar. He is a member of Crop Science Society of Nigeria, Genetic Society of Nigeria and Japanese Society of Breeding, and has attended and made presentations at local (Nigeria) and international (Japan and Germany) conferences. To his credit are research articles published in international journals—BMC Genetics, Scientific Reports, American Journal of Plant Sciences and African Journal of Plan Science—a conference paper and abstracts. He is currently developing a breeding program to address the enhancement of grain yield and flour quality parameters of wheat under heat-stress. .