Bruno Tinland is co-founder of Semafort, a seed company with the objective to establish a high seed quality segment in the portfolio of partnering West African seed companies.
In 1990, After obtaining his PhD in molecular and cellular biology from the Louis Pasteur University of Strasbourg, Bruno Tinland was granted a fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) to pursue research work on plant genetic recombination at the Friedrich Miescher-Institute in Basel, Switzerland.
He then obtained the French habilitation to lead research work in 1995 and became the same year team lead in the department of Prof. Ingo Potrykus, dedicated to improving food crops for developing countries, at the Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich, Switzerland.
He joined the Monsanto Company in 1999 where he had a variety of responsibilities within the regulatory department. He has worked closely with African stakeholders involved in agriculture for the last 10 years, contributing to establishment of workable policies to enable farmers accessing the newest genetics and technologies. During this period, he became familiar to issues critical to some agricultural value chain development. In
2017, he decided to co-found “Semafort”, a Burkinabe seed company located in Bobo Dioulasso, with the aim to addressing the need for high quality seed in the region.