Anna Elizabeth Backhaus, from Germany, has been interested in wheat genetics since she was 12 years old. A second-year PhD student at the John Innes Centre, where she is supervised by Cristobal Uauy and Richard Morris, Backhaus focuses on the genetic network in control of early spike development and trying to understand how developmental decisions are encoded in the wheat genome. As part of her project, she is performing RNA-sequencing on sections of the young wheat spike using single cell technologies, and using this approach to identify genetic networks in control of spikelet number and grain number, two interlinked traits that control final plant yield. She is phenotyping these yield traits in the Watkins collection of about 800 wheat landraces to identify novel genes for spike traits. Backhaus studied plant sciences at the University of East Anglia (Bsc) and University Bonn (Msc). She has also worked at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne and ICARDA.