Petr Kosina joined UC IPM as our new content development supervisor in April. Kosina manages the team that develops content for our online and print publications. He has great outreach material development, supervisory, and leadership experience, so we're very happy he joined us.
Kosina's previous position was at CIMMYT, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, where he developed online tools such as Wheat Atlas and Wheat Doctor; organized and facilitated training courses, meetings and conferences in Africa, Asia and Latin America; managed CIMMYT’s social media, and developed training programs for extension workers in Mexico.
Kosina has a PhD in Crop Science with 10 years of experience teaching horticulture, vegetable, and fruit production. He developed many outreach materials similar to what we produce at UC IPM, such as extension publications on striga, a parasitic weed, stem borers in rice and wheat, and wheat stem rust. He has developed communications products for both technical and non-technical audiences.
He taught a course on leadership for researchers in the international agricultural research centers and uses its principles in his everyday work. He is a self-described technology and social media geek, which should help us as we use more advanced communications platforms. Kosina is multilingual in Czech, English, Spanish, and Russian, and is learning French.