Stanford Blade, PhD
Contact
Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sci - Deans Office
- blade@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
plant breeding intercropping agricultural development farming systems agronomy
About
Dr. Blade is Deputy Director General (Research) for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT, http://www.icrisat.org). Stan is Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences (ALES) at the University of Alberta.
Dr. Blade is a 2012 graduate of the Wharton Business School’s Executive Development Program (University of Pennsylvania). He currently serves as Vice-Chair on the Board of Trustees of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation ( http://www.aatf-africa.org/ ), a Nairobi-based agency supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Dr. Blade previously served as the Deputy Director General (Research) for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). IITA is a world-class research organization that is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (www.cgiar.org). Dr. Blade was a member of the Alliance Deputy Executive of the CGIAR. IITA is based in Ibadan, Nigeria, and has additional research stations in eastern and northern Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. IITA has 150 internationally-recruited research and technology transfer experts based in fifteen countries within Africa.
Dr. Blade has published 90+ research articles, ten book chapters, 170+ conference abstracts and has edited four books. He has been the winner of several awards from the American Society of Agronomy and the Crop Science Society of America. Dr. Blade is a member of several professional societies and international committees, and has served on the editorial boards of several international journals. Dr. Blade has worked and traveled in 85+ countries.
Dr. Blade was born in Alberta, Canada where he was raised on a dairy and grain farm. He attended the University of Alberta for his first degree (B.Sc.) in genetics. He obtained his M.Sc. (Crop Science) from the University of Saskatchewan for a breeding/physiology study on wheat. Dr. Blade’s doctorate was awarded by McGill University (Montreal, Canada) for work done at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture on a Canadian International Development Agency Ph.D. Scholarship. The thesis topic was a plant breeding/farming systems approach to improving an indigenous grain legume (Vigna unguiculata L.) for use within the complex cereal-legume cropping systems of the West African savanna.