Catherine Feuillet received her Ph.D. in 1993 from the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (France). She completed her postdoctoral studies and became assistant professor at the University of Zurich, focusing her research on the isolation of disease resistance genes and the genome structure and evolution of wheat and barley. Following her passion for wheat science, in 2004 Catherine was appointed research director by the INRA (French National Agricultural Research Institute) to lead and develop wheat genomics projects. Catherine joined Bayer CropScience in 2013 and became the head of trait research.

Since 2018, she is the Chief Scientific Officer at Inari, the SEEDesign™ company working to solve the critical issues of food security and sustainability by designing nature-positive seed. Catherine leads a group of ~100 scientists (located in Cambridge, MA, USA and Ghent, Belgium) working to advance a technology platform that integrates A.I.- enabled predictive design and advanced multiplex gene editing tools to develop seeds that meet the world’s needs – all in far less time and with much greater precision and far fewer resources than current approaches.

As one of the founders of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, Catherine was elected the French “golden woman of the year for research” in 2008. The following year, she received the “Prix Foulon” from the French Academy of Sciences for her achievements in wheat research. Her recognitions also include the Legion of Honour (2010), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011) and the “Prix J. Dufrenoy” from the French Academy of Agriculture (2012). She recently was recognized as one of the 2025 Top Agri-food Pioneers by the World Food Prize foundation.

Catherine is dedicated to developing and guiding the next generation of scientists, having supervised the work of more than 30 master’s, Ph.D. and postdoc scientists. Her work has been published in more than 130 peer-reviewed journals and books.