Jesse Poland is Professor at King Adbdullah University of Science and Technology and serves as Director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Applied Wheat Genomics and as the Director of the Wheat Genetics Resource Center Industry-University Cooperative Research Center. Poland co-leads the Phenomics component of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement.

Poland’s research group is focused on wheat genetics and germplasm improvement. They are currently developing new marker technologies for use in breeding and association genetics. They are also focused on developing germplasm with resistance to important diseases of wheat; stem rust, stripe rust, and leaf rust, hessian fly and barley yellow dwarf as well as abiotic stress tolerance to heat and drought. In collaboration with public breeding programs they are implementing the use of genomic selection methods in wheat breeding and are developing field-based high throughput phenotyping platforms to accelerate basic and applied genomics and breeding research.