Cibele Zaccaron is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Ainsworth team. For the RIPE project, she leads research data management efforts, working across cross-functional teams to support researchers, PIs, project leadership, and collaborators, ensuring research data are organized, quality-controlled, accessible, and effectively shared  for the RIPE Project, including sponsors and other stakeholders.

In addition, Cibele helps track the plant transformation pipeline and coordinates biotechnology regulatory compliance, permitting, stewardship, traceability, logistics, and transfers of regulated biological materials, including seed, while supporting Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs).

Before joining RIPE, Cibele worked with the Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) - USAID’s Feed the Future Innovation Lab, where she led initiatives to accelerate soybean variety registration, commercialization, and market adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her work spanned the soybean value chain and included variety selection and data analysis, regulatory strategy and policy, stakeholder and partnership engagement, licensing, and commercialization efforts to help advance improved soybean varieties toward farmers.

Cibele earned a bachelor’s degree in Agronomic Engineering and a master’s degree in Crop Science from the Federal University of Lavras (UFLA), Brazil. She was also a visiting researcher at The Ohio State University, working with the Seed Biology Laboratory and Ornamental Plant Germplasm Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Crop Science and Soybean breeding from the University of São Paulo (USP/ESALQ), completing part of her doctoral research in Plant Molecular Biology and Genetics at the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign