European Seed just put the spotlight on some of the young people that are active in our sector, and provide an inspiration for others. 20 people in the age group until 30 years, often termed as ‘Generation Z’ (or Gen Z), were chosen. One of them is Computomics employee Dr. Cathy Westhues.

From the article:

"With her broad and comprehensive knowledge in machine learning and breeding, Dr. Cathy Westhues pioneers in bringing these two disciplines together. Helping plant breeders to make an informed choice and supporting breeding decisions applying machine learning is in her DNA. Cathy is an extraordinary personality with a strong character who brings innovation into an extremely traditional industry.

Cathy developed an R package using novel machine learning techniques which lets you input multi-environment breeding datasets — genomic, phenotypic and potentially environmental data. These methods generally result in more precise environment-specific phenotypic predictions than traditional statistical methods. Besides focusing on further developing and advancing xSeedScore, Computomics’ machine learning-based technology for predictive breeding, Cathy is working in customer-specific projects related to understanding and predicting the interaction between plants and their environment. Cathy’s passion, curiosity and thinking outside the box inspires the whole team."

Read the article by European Seed

Computomics is proud to employ such an outstanding and accomplished young scientist. We congratulate Cathy wholeheartedly to her recognition by European Seed. It is truly a remarkable achievement and a testament to her hard work, dedication, and exceptional talent.