As a senior research officer at KARI who manages several critical projects, Ruth Amata wears many different lab coats. Amata is KARI’s project coordinator for BioEarn (Project 2), a Swedish government-funded project in East Africa with a network of collaborators and partners in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. This project examines the distribution of viral diseases that contribute greatly to yield loss in cassava and sweet potato crops, disease transmission studies (vectors), and disease epidemiology. “We visited sweet potato and cassava farmers and collected and characterized Kenyan germplasm for resistance to viral diseases,” says Amata. “We also characterized sweet potato germplasm for high dry matter content, which is desirable to consumers.”