Dr Cuellar completed his Bach. Sc. studies in Peru at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of University Villarreal in Lima. In 2008 he obtained a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from the University of Helsinki in Finland, working on the African version of the devastating Sweet Potato Virus Disease. Then, following a 3-year Postdoctoral stage at the International Potato Center (CIP) working on sweet potato and potato diseases. He joined the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in 2012 as the lead Virologist, coordinating projects in bean, rice and cassava diseases in the tropics. Since 2018 he leads the Cassava Crop Protection team of the Cassava Program, with laboratories in Colombia and Laos, as a Senior Scientist at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. His work fusions classic phytopathology with current sequencing technologies to accelerate our understanding of transboundary diseases. During these years he led several international research projects on diseases affecting vegetative propagated crops in the tropics thus supporting safe exchange of germplasm, distribution of clean planting material, early warning programs, and more efficient disease management strategies.

Key Contributions relevant to ISTRC

• He validated a novel method for developing selectable marker-free transgenic potato plants based on the Cre-lox recombination mechanism of Bacteriophage P1.
• Sweet potato Virus Disease: He contributed to the elucidation of a novel mechanism of viral silencing suppression by sweet potato chlorotic stunt virus (Crinivirus).
• Virus characterization by HTS: developed sequencing protocols for the rapid characterization of RNA and DNA viruses in potato, sweet potato and cassava using illumina and nanopore platforms.
• Cassava Frogskin Disease: In late 2024, his team identifyed single torradovirus infections as the primary cause of this disease in the Americas.
• Cassava Witches' Broom (CWBD): He led the research team identifying the fungus Ceratobasidium theobromaeas the pathogen behind CWBD in Southeast Asia and its first reported presence in the Americas.
• He has co-organized multiple capacity building workshops in Asia and the Americas focused on improving disease diagnostics and the characterization of emergent pathogens.
• Biosecurity Progress: In early 2025, he contributed to a decade-long review on the implications of high-throughput sequencing (HTS)in plant virus biosecurity. 

Online profiles:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4702-3237 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilmer-cuellar/ 

Google Scholar: Wilmer J. Cuellar