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