Béla Teeken is an associate social and gender scientist at IITA and is based in Ibadan Nigeria. He is especially interested in how the biophysical environment, local institutions, and culture shape and determine local agricultural innovations and how such innovations and practices relate to those of formal scientific research.

He worked shortly on grassroots innovations at the NGO ‘Sristi’ in India, before pursuing his PhD research at Wageningen University. He has an interdisciplinary background with an MSc thesis in rural development sociology and another in agronomy/plant physiology from Wageningen University. His PhD research combined these disciplines and covered field research in the Togo Hills in Ghana and Togo to study the interaction between rice genotypes, ecological and sociocultural factors within farmer seed innovation, and selection pathways among different ethnic minorities. After his PhD research he worked at IITA as a post-doctoral fellow on interdisciplinary research including social segmentation and specifically gender, in relation to user-preferred cassava trait preferences.

Within the Nextgen Cassava and RTB foods and RTB CRP projects he is now working together with biophysical scientist to further study gender and other social dynamics in relation to crop production and processing to inform and reform CGIAR breeding programs to develop more accurate breeding programs.