Dr. Hasina Khatun was born and grew up in Tangail, a district of Dhaka, in Bangladesh. She completed her bachelor’s degree in agriculture at Bangladesh Agricultural University and received an MSc in Biotechnology from the same university.

She completed her PhD in Plant Breeding from University of Philippines Los Banos, Philippines, in 2020, where her research involved working on the Green Super Rice Project at the International Rice Research Institute. There, she worked to develop a systematic breeding population selected for SWFT (Saline Water Flooding Tolerant) and mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) governing tolerance to saline water flooding through linkage analysis using a designed QTL pyramiding population and by adopting a standardized screening protocol.

She joined the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), Gazipur, Bangladesh, as a Scientific Officer in 2009 and was promoted to Senior Scientific Officer (SSO) in 2019 within the Plant Breeding Division, BRRI. She is an accomplished rice breeder, who was involved in the development of several rice varieties as a co-investigator for both favorable and abiotic stress ecosystems. Her responsibility was to conduct inbred rice varietal developmental for the development of salt-tolerant and insect-resistant rice using conventional and modern breeding techniques, including transforming rice breeding, rapid generation advancement and molecular approaches (trait mapping and QTL discovery, marker assisted selection and gene pyramiding).

During her time at GIFS, she will be working on molecular characterization of a diverse rice germplasm panel using GBS technology to identify a core set of germplasm for enabling pangenome construction and GWAS for identifying important traits related to abiotic stress.