is the Resident Director for SouthEast Asian Island Countries and the Coordinator for Oil Palm Research at Cirad, the French Centre for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development.

His research work focuses on epigenetic variation in higher plants, specifically in exploring the role of DNA methylation in the determination of somaclonal variation in the oil palm.

Dr Alain RIVAL is an agronomist by training and a plant molecular physiologist; he received his PhD in Plant Biotechnology from the University of Montpellier in 1988 then he spent the first years of his career (1985-1995) running collaborative plant biotechnology programmes overseas (Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Malaysia, Costa Rica).

Alain qualified for the Habilitation of Research Director in Life Sciences in 1997 from the University of Paris and he is a Qualified Professor in Biology and Physiology since 2002.

Dr Rival spent two years as a Marie Curie International Fellow at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, Australia (2004-2006), under the framework of an European Commission-funded project in plant epigenetics called EPIDEV.

Alain RIVAL is based in Jakarta, Indonesia since September 2014, coordinating Cirad collaborative research programs and partnership in the Region.He is the author and co-author of more than 80 research articles and book chapters.