Sampath was born and raised from a small village in Tamilnadu, India, and completed his post-graduate in Biotechnology at Tamilnadu Agricultural University, Tamilnadu. Sampath has been a Research Officer with GIFS since November 2020 working in P2IRC Flagship 1 and the “Identification and exploitation of genome structural variants for trait improvement in Prairie crops” ADF project funded by WGRF, SaskWheat, Alberta Wheat Commission and SaskCanola. Before this, Sampath has had over a decade of research experience in plant genomics and bioinformatics. He competed his PhD from Seoul National University, South Korea through the PhD fellowship (2009 -2014) from the Korean government scholarship program. He then moved to AAFC Saskatoon in their post-doctoral program where he worked with Dr. Isobel Parkin (2016-2020) on various Brassica genomics projects. He was also a successful holder of a MITACS elevate post-doctoral fellowship (2018-2020) and worked in-collaboration with Cargill as an industry partner.

Sampath has a broad knowledge and experience in plant molecular biology, genomics, and genome evolution and his research interest include whole-genome assembly, transposon biology, chloroplast assembly and various molecular breeding techniques such as MARS, MABC, GWAS, GS. He was instrumental in the development of a high-quality and highly contiguous assembly of the black mustard genome (Brassica nigra) using long-read sequencing that was published in August 2020 as part of a collaborative effort by AAFC and GIFS.

In his current role at GIFS, Sampath will co-lead the PIP projects with Dr. Andrew Sharpe which will require regular liaising across GIFS researchers (e.g., post-docs, students and technicians), management and platform leads (e.g., OPAL, DMA, PGF), externally with collaborators and stakeholders (academia, government and industry), and other end-users.