Alain RIVAL is a Senior Project Manager for South-East Asia at Cirad, the French Centre for International Cooperation in Agricultural Research for Development.
Agronomist by training, and a plant molecular physiologist, he obtained his PhD in plant biotechnology at the University of Montpellier in 1988 and spent the first years of his career (1985-1995) leading collaborative R&D projects in plant biotechnology, mainly in Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Malaysia and Costa Rica.
In 1997 Alain was awarded a HDR (Habilitation as a Research Director) degree in Life Sciences from the University of Paris-Sud, Orsay and is a Qualified Professor in both Biology and Physiology since 2002.
He was a Marie Curie Fellow at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, Australia, running the EPIDEV project (2004-2007) on plant epigenetics funded by the European Commission aimed at better understanding the molecular regulation of genes governing flower structure in higher plants.
From 2014 to 2025 Alain was based in Jakarta coordinating Cirad collaborative R&D and training programs joining various partners in the region and was invited as a visiting professor at University Putra Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur in 2015-2016.
He now coordinates the TALENT Programme, which aims at renovating the training of plantation managers, and is involved in the TRAILS Project located in Sabah, Borneo, focusing on the field assessment of agroforestry-based systems.
Alain is author or co-author of more than 80 research articles and book chapters, co-wrote "Palms of Controversies" with Patrice Levang in 2014 (CIFOR Publishing, Bogor) and coordinated the two volumes of "Achieving sustainable cultivation of oil palm" (Burleigh Dodds Science, Cambridge, UK).