Claire Luby
Organization: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Location: Madison, Wisconsin USA
Biography
Claire recently completed her Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her thesis focused on assessing genetic variation and freedom to operate in a large collection of U.S. carrot cultivars. Claire’s work asked whether the cultivars with “freedom to operate” in carrot breeding—that is, cultivars without intellectual property restrictions—represent an adequate portion of the total genetic variability of the crop. In addition, in collaboration with Irwin Goldman, Claire developed eight intellectual-property-free populations of carrot germplasm based upon market and color classes and released them as OSSI-Pledged varieties, thus providing ideal sources of material that all interested can use to breed new open source carrot varieties. Claire is a co-founder of OSSI as well as a member of the Board of Directors. In addition to being executive director, Claire is also working on Postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Photo credit: Matthew Dillon)
