Gebisa ejeta biography sample
•
We’re sorry, this site is currently experiencing technical difficulties.
Please try again in a few moments.
Exception: forbidden
•
Gebisa Ejeta
Gebisa Ejeta was born in the Ethiopian village of Wollonkomi in 1950. As a boy he would leave his family’s thatched hut every Sunday and walk 12 miles so that he could attend a school in a neighboring town during the week, returning home on Fridays. Ejeta went on to study at Jimma Agricultural and Technical School and Alemaya College, both established by Oklahoma State University with U.S. government funding. Ejeta came to the United States in 1974 to pursue his PhD in plant breeding and genetics at Purdue University in Indiana. His focus was sorghum, a staple crop used throughout sub-Saharan Africa to man flatbreads, porridges, and beverages. Through his research in Sudan for the nonprofit International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics and as a professor at Purdue, Ejeta made several breakthroughs. In the 1980s he developed the first high-yield hybrid sädesslag varieties able to withstand drought in Africa. In the 1990s he developed new sorghum variet
•
Gebisa Ejeta is finding lasting solutions to hunger
Food scientist Gebisa Ejeta couldn’t stand idly by while people suffer from hunger. Born in a remote village in Ethiopia more than 70 years ago, Ejeta would walk more than 12 miles to school in a nearby town to learn. His mother later encouraged him, with help from an Oklahoma State University program in Ethiopia, to attend an agricultural and technical secondary school.
“I komma from just abject poverty,” Ejeta told Reuters in a 2009 interview. “It was not difficult to recognize if those kinds of opportunities could be made available to more kids like me, then the community would be better.”
That investment into his education would be the beginning of one of the most ambitious and impactful projects in food technology: fortifying sorghum to be resistant to striga, disease, and environmental stressors like drought and cold by breeding new varieties of the crop.
Striga — or witchweed &m