Medha Devare is an agronomist and microbial ecologist with experience in bioinformatics, data management and semantic web standards and tools. She is a Senior Scientist at CGIAR’s International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA), and Chief Data Scientist for the Excellence in Agronomy Initiative (EiA). She provides the vision and leadership to develop a data-to-analytics ecosystem for EiA and CGIAR, and spearheads efforts to operationalize the FAIR Principles towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data. Prior to this Medha was a module lead to advance data-related work through CGIAR’s Big Data Platform and the Open Access and Open Data Initiative. As a scientist with CIMMYT before this, she coordinated a project to increase the productivity and profitability of small farmers and the sustainability of farming systems in western Nepal. Before moving to CGIAR, Medha worked at Cornell University where she also received a PhD and helped develop VIVO, a semantic web application for representing research and scholarship.