Leonardo has earned an M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Plant Breeding from the Federal University of Vicosa (UFV), Brazil. During my Ph.D., I had the opportunity to be a Visiting Student at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and a Research Scholar at the University of Minnesota (UMN). In these roles, I worked on developing High Throughput Phenotyping (HTP) pipelines for wheat, corn, and soybeans using drone imagery. From 2021 to 2023, I worked as a Postdoc Research Associate at the Department of Plant Soil and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State University (MSU), where I led an applied phenotyping breeding program in dry beans. At MSU, I have been involved in developing artificial intelligence approaches and implementing several HTP pipelines to improve the dry bean program, specifically in traits such as plant height, stand count, maturity date, and others, as well as handling mixed models data analysis. Recently, I embarked on a new career journey in the industry at Corteva, where I am currently part of the Precision Phenotyping team, based in Johnston, IA.
