2024 - Catalyst: Looking back at 2023 and ahead to the new year.

2023 people and places 

Last year was a year for a lot of change for me personally and professionally and 2024 is looking to be another dynamic year at Bayer and for me. This year, I hope to be a catalyst for helping connect people, ideas, problems and solutions. 

One kind of fun metric for me of my career evolution is to look at the jobs that LinkedIn's algorithm recommends. It is a fun and eclectic mix - VP of Product Design for Facebook, customer sales representative for multiple companies, a quantitative genetics role at a start-up, digital design, and a breeding lead role. Some of the mix-up is that my role titles in 2023 changed from cotton product design - which was leading the cotton breeding team responsible for population improvement, parent and line selection, and genomic prediction, to then Customer Insights Deployment Lead - where I am working on selection indices, breeding product concept definitions, and incorporating customer feedback in how we breed and what we select. 

All those titles are a bit of a word salad and confusing to LinkedIn's algorithm, but there is a connecting thread from my education in cytogenetics, agronomy, plant breeding to my current role. I still continue to be interested in how to test new ideas for how to improve agriculture and breeding. I am grateful that Monsanto and now Bayer has let me do that in new ways throughout my career. 

I am a terrible pessimist by nature. If you ask me if I am a "glass half full" or "glass half empty" kind of person, I am probably a "glass going to be all the empty eventually, and let me tell you how" kind of person. Last year, I had some really unique opportunities for collaboration and travel last year that have given me a lot of optimism and hope that we will be able to meet and solve the looming problems in agriculture and climate change. I was able to visit Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand. Visiting customers, breeders, and scientists in across the globe gives me a lot of hope as I see the brilliant people and solutions that they are working on for some really big and hard problems. 

I want to thank those that have collaborated with me in 2023 and hope to do better at that in 2024. I had some mental health and personal challenges that meant I had to step away from work I was committed to and not doing well with NAPB. I have been the world's slowest writer for some papers that I have been working on with IITA and Roslin scientists. 

In 2024, I want to continue that journey - connecting people, ideas, and solutions to the big global challenges that we face. That is the commitment I want to make for this next year - to be a better catalyst for that purpose. 

Happy 2024 and looking forward to the new year.