Elizabeth Arnaud

Elizabeth Arnaud’s career reflects her leadership in digital solutions for agriculture, her expertise in ontology and open data management for genetic resources, breeding, and food systems, and her unwavering commitment to mentorship and international collaboration.
For the past four years, Elizabeth served as Thematic Leader and co-Lead of the Digital Solutions Team within the Digital Inclusion Lever at the Alliance of Bioversity & CIAT. She has been a driving force behind the Crop Ontology project since 2008, providing strategic leadership and supporting the management of crop breeding data. As part of the Periodic Food Table Initiative, she led the ontology and metadata workstream, contributing to innovations in food systems. Earlier in her CGIAR career, Elizabeth coordinated the development and deployment of the Musa Germplasm Information System (MGIS), a pioneering platform for banana collections. She organized on-site training for curators and data managers in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, enhancing their data management skills. Her editorial contributions include the Musa Descriptors for Morpho-Taxonomy, the Musalogue varietal catalogues, and a catalogue of Musa accessions collected by Prof. Allen in Southeast Asia. Elizabeth also coordinated activities under the CGIAR Global Public Goods Programme II, where she contributed to the development of an online seed ordering system for SINGER and created geospatial databases and repositories for crop sample data. From 2014 to 2020, she was co-principal investigator for the NSF-funded Planteome ontology project, collaborating with Oregon State University. In 2017, Elizabeth joined the management team of the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, where she led the Ontology Community of Practice, later integrated into the Digital Innovation Initiative. She championed CGIAR’s contributions to AGROVOC, the FAO’s multilingual thesaurus for food and agriculture.

Beyond her work within CGIAR, Elizabeth has played influential roles on advisory and scientific committees. She has been a member of the Integrated Breeding Platform and DivSeek advisory boards, as well as the Scientific Committee of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), where she also served as CGIAR’s Head of Delegation. She has contributed to European projects such as the TITAN Project on digital innovations for food system transparency and sustainability, and the Philosophy of Open Science project. Additionally, she was invited to join the Scientific Committee of #Digitag, the French Convergences Institute for Digital Agriculture.

Elizabeth’s dedication to mentorship has shaped the careers of numerous young scientists from diverse backgrounds, ensuring the next generation continues to advance innovation in agriculture and food systems.