Moira Sheehan is the Director of the Breeding Insight program at Cornell, which was founded in 2019 as a USDA-ARS initiative to bring genomic and phenomics tools and software solutions to ARS breeders. Her role in VitisGen3 is to assist with technology transfer and adoption across a broad range of grape breeding needs, including genotyping support. Before coming to Cornell in 2019, she work for 9 years at Nature Source Improved Plants as Research Scientist and Project Manager. In that time, she had worked with 12 different crops to help major and small seed companies optimize their breeding pipelines. Prior to joining the industry, she received her Ph.D. from Cornell in 2006 with Tom Brutnell, then went on to be USDA Postdoctoral Fellow with Wojtek Pawlowski’s lab and a Postdoctoral Researcher in Ed Buckler’s lab, both at Cornell University.
