Consultant; Locally Job San Francisco area,California USA,Research/Development

Position: Consultant (Locally Recruited)

CIMMYT is a cutting edge, non-profit, international organization dedicated to solving tomorrow's problems today. It is entrusted with fostering improved quantity, quality, and dependability of production systems and basic cereals such as maize, wheat, triticale, sorghum, millets, and associated crops through applied agricultural science, particularly in the Global South, through building strong partnerships. This combination enhances the livelihood trajectories and resilience of millions of resource-poor farmers, while working towards a more productive, inclusive, and resilient agrifood system within planetary boundaries.

For more information, visit cimmyt.org.

The CIMMYT Dryland Crops Program supports crop improvement activities across sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, chickpea, pigeonpea, and groundnut. The program generates and manages large volumes of breeding, phenotyping, and multi-location trial data that require timely, high quality, and reproducible analysis to support product advancement, selection decisions, reporting, and strategic planning.

To strengthen data analysis support for the Dryland Crops Program, CIMMYT seeks an experienced Consultant – Data Analysis and Biometrics Support to contribute to statistical analysis, data quality control, reporting, and documentation of breeding trial datasets.

Requirements Objective of the consultancy

The objective of this consultancy is to provide technical support to CIMMYT-DCP in the analysis of breeding trial data, ensuring that datasets are quality checked, analyzed using appropriate statistical methods, and translated into clear outputs for breeder decision-making and program reporting.

Scope of work

The consultant will work closely with the CIMMYT quantitative genetics, biometrics, data management, and breeding teams to support the following areas:

Review and organize breeding trial datasets received from different crops, locations, partners, and seasons.

Conduct data quality checks, including review of trial design, trait structure, missing values, outliers, plot-level inconsistencies, genotype naming, location metadata, and treatment information.

Clean and prepare datasets for statistical analysis according to agreed CIMMYT workflows.

Conduct appropriate statistical analyses for breeding trials, including single-site analysis, across-location analysis, and estimation of adjusted means or BLUPs where applicable.

Generate analysis outputs required for product advancement, breeder review, reporting, and decision-making.

Document analysis procedures, scripts, assumptions, and outputs to ensure reproducibility and handover to CIMMYT teams.

Support harmonization of analysis outputs across crops and projects.

Participate in regular technical check-ins with CIMMYT-DCP staff to review progress, resolve data issues, and prioritize assigned datasets.

The consultant will be expected to deliver the following

Data inventory and review: A reviewed list of assigned datasets, including crop, location/instance, trial type, trait count, data status, and analysis requirements.

Data quality control output: QC reports for assigned datasets, documenting missing data, outliers, design issues, genotype inconsistencies, metadata gaps, and recommended corrections.

Cleaned analysis-ready datasets:
Curated datasets prepared for statistical analysis, with documented changes and assumptions.

Trial-level statistical analysis:
Analysis outputs for assigned single-location trials, including adjusted means or relevant model outputs, summary statistics, trait-level diagnostics, and interpretation notes.

Multi-location / multi-environment analysis, where applicable:
Across-location analysis outputs for assigned datasets, including genotype performance summaries, variance…