SEB Centenary Conference 2023

Dr. Robert Hancock

The James Hutton Institute

Rob Hancock has spent 25 years investigating the impact of genetics and environment on crop quality with a particular focus on potatoes and soft fruit.  His initial work focussed on ascorbic acid biosynthesis and long-distance transport with respect to accumulation in fruit and tubers.  More recently he takes physiological, biochemical and molecular approaches to identify the key genes and processes associated with the maintenance of crop nutritional quality under unpredictable environments.

Rob is an active member of the SEB having organised sessions for previous annual meetings and is an associate editor for the Journal of Experimental Botany.

Professor Christine Foyer

University of Birmingham

Christine is an expert in plant metabolism and its regulation under optimal and stress conditions. Her lab focuses on the role of reduction/oxidation (redox) processes and signals that regulate plant growth and stress tolerance, studying how primary processes alter the redox status of cells and associated phytohormone signalling. She is the Editor in Chief of Food and Energy Security and holds the Janaki Ammal Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences. She is a Member of the Environmental Sustainability Board of the FERRERO group and is a Member of the French Academy of Agriculture. She is one of the 2022 Highly Cited Researchers™ list from Clarivate™.

 

Dr. Raul Huertas

The James Hutton Institute

Raul's interests go through supporting efficient and sustainable agriculture and food production. His research focuses on understanding and improving crop tolerance to abiotic stresses and reducing the need for nutrient input or overcoming soil nutrient limitations. More recently, he has also focused on understanding how to maintain or increase the nutritional load of crops for human consumption. Raul embraces multidisciplinary research, integrating plant physiology, molecular biology and biochemistry approaches in plant model species and crops.

Professor Derek Stewart

The James Hutton Institute

Prof Stewart is Director of the Advanced Plant Growth Centre (APGC), a £27M regional development project at the James Hutton Institute and Chair of Plant and Food Chemistry at Heriot Watt University.  For over 30 years Derek has worked at the industry-academia interface leading multiple (inter)national multiparter projects.  As director of the APGC he oversees research, development and innovation around crops grown ‘under cover’ and post-harvest storage facilities. Derek is also on the board of Bloom Biotechnology ltd, a joint venture in crop biotechnology, between James Hutton Ltd and Epigentica Ltd; and Upcycled Plant Protein, a start-up harvesting sustainable food protein from unharvested crop biomass.

 

Professor Paul Fraser

Royal Holloway University of London; UK

Professor Paul D. Fraser is a University of London Professor of Biochemistry at Royal Holloway, University of London. Presently he is the Department of biological Sciences director of research. In addition, Prof Fraser is a member of the Food Standard Agencies advisory committee for novel foods and processes. He has coordinated multiple large integrated EU consortia within FP7 and is the consortium lead for the BBSRC-GCRF Nutrifood project and 21EBTA-Celfacto. Research interests include the carotenoid biosynthesis and its regulatory.  The development of food and non-food crops plants with enhanced and altered nutritional and industrial carotenoids/isoprenoids. Underpinning these activities are metabolomic and proteomic platforms. 

 

Professor Paul Kimani

University of Nairobi; Kenya;

Prof. P. M. Kimani received both an M. Sc. in Agronomy and PhD in Genetics and Plant Breeding from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught genetics and plant breeding, agronomy, seed science and technology at the University of Nairobi for the last 35 years.  His major research interests include genetics and breeding of improved bean, onion and pigeonpea varieties. More than 30 of his varieties have been released for commercial production. He has shared his genetic resources with scientists in Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe and Australia. 

Prof Kimani is the author of more than 360 scientific publications and book chapters. He has co-authored four books and one monograph, more than 90 conference papers and has written more than 70 technical reports based on his research work. He has received numerous awards. He reviews for several international journals.

Professor Andrew Allan

University of Auckland; New Zealand

Andrew Allan studied biochemistry and cell biology at the University of Canterbury (Bsc(Hons)) New Zealand, then gained a Commonwealth Fellowship to study in Cambridge. He received his PhD in Biochemistry at Cambridge University in 1992.  Post-Doc’s in Edinburgh (as a BBSRC Fellow) and Israel (an EMBO fellow) followed, in projects studying plant stress responses.

In Dec 1997 he returned to New Zealand to study fruit tree responses to stress (in the Institute of Plant and Food Research), joining the University of Auckland as a lecturer in 2003.  He is currently programme leader of a MBIE-(NZ)-funded project studying the effect of the climate crisis on flowering in perennial trees.

His current research focuses on plant signal transduction, with projects on transcriptional regulation of flowering and plant pigments in fruits, flowers and vegetables.

Dr Hatem Rouached

Michigan State University; USA

H. Rouached gained scientific and managerial skills during his PhD (University of Montpellier, France, 2002-2005), his Postdoc (University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 2005-2009), and as Senior Scientist in Crop Design (BASF Company, Ghent, Belgium, 2010-2012). In 2012, he was recruited at INRA, France. He was then visiting faculty at Carnegie Institution for Science (Stanford, USA, 2016-2018). Concurrently, he was an adjunct Professor at Chiang Mai University- Thailand. In 2020, he joined Michigan State University, the Plant Resilience Institute, the Department of Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences, and the Plant Resilience Institute, East Lansing, Michigan, USA.  

 

Professor Gail Taylor

UC Davis; USA

Talk title: Eat your greens: developing improved nutrition for human health in lettuce and watercress using molecular breeding approaches

Gail Taylor is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis. She holds the John B Orr Endowed Professorship of Environmental Plant Sciences. She has been working on leafy green crops for over twenty years her research is currently focused on using genomics and genetics to improve crop quality, reduce food waste and enable the development of clean and safe greens through indoor farming.

Dr Gabriela Pagnussat

Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

Dr. Gabriela Pagnussat obtained her PhD degree in Biological Sciences in

2000 from Mar del Plata National University in Argentina. Her work in plants as a recent PhD graduate (2001-2002) with Dr. Lorenzo Lamattina has led to the discovery of nitric oxide signalling pathways in plants, which is currently recognized as a fundamental molecule that regulates different aspects of plant growth and development. She did a post-doctoral training from 2003-2008 at Dr. Sundaresan lab at UCDavis, USA, leading to the discovery of auxin as a main player in embryo sac patterning in Arabidopsis thaliana. Back to Mar del Plata, Argentina, she started her own group working on the regulation of embryo sac development in plants, earning in 2011 the Howard Hughes International Early Career award. Her lab work focused on mitochondrial signalling pathways, identifying reactive oxygen species as key molecules regulating embryo sac development, fertilization and early embryo development in plants. More recently, her work revealed the existence of a mitochondrial electron shuttle required for brassinosteroid synthesis and early embryogenesis in the Arabidopsis megagametophyte.

A new line of research studying programmed cell dead led to a collaborative investigation with Dr. Brent Stockwell at Columbia University, discovering that ferroptosis, an oxidative, iron-dependent type of cell death is present in plants in response to high temperatures. Since then, her lab has been focused in the biochemical pathways that determine ferroptosis cell death in plants, finding out that many of the hallmarks already described for animal systems are also present in plant models. More recently, her lab found that ferroptosis is also triggered in a photosynthetic cyanobacteria, which suggested that ferroptosis might be an ancient cell death program.

Prof Erin Connolly

Penn State University, USA

Erin Connolly is Professor and Department Head of Plant Science in the College of Agriculture at Penn State University. Research in the Connolly lab focuses on the molecular mechanisms that control micronutrient (iron and copper) uptake and translocation in plants and that limit the accumulation of toxic elements like cadmium. Current estimates indicate that ~3 billion people suffer from iron deficiency and plant foods serve as the principal source of iron for most people. In addition, ~30% of the world's soils are considered iron-limiting for plant growth. Work in the Connolly lab is thus aimed at generating information that will lead to the development of crop varieties that serve as better dietary sources of iron and/or that show improved growth on micronutrient-poor soils.

Dr. Brittany Hazard

Quadram Institute, UK

Brittany Hazard is a Career-track Group Leader at Quadram Institute Bioscience. Her research programme focuses on improving starch quality in wheat for human health and is a joint project between the Quadram Institute and the John Innes Centre. The research in her lab is interdisciplinary and spans across wheat genetics, food and health sciences.  An ultimate aim is to develop novel wheat germplasm that can deliver resistant starch to consumers and to understand its impacts on health.

 

Dr. John Lunn

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology

John Lunn studied the regulation of sucrose biosynthesis in plants for his PhD with Tom ap Rees at the University of Cambridge. After post-doctoral studies in France, he joined CSIRO in Canberra, Australia, to work on C₄ photosynthesis and carbohydrate metabolism with Hal Hatch. In 2002, he moved to the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Potsdam-Golm, Germany, where he leads a group studying trehalose 6-phosphate and sugar signalling in plants. He is also a partner in the International C₄ Rice project and, since 2020, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

Dr. Franziska Fichtner

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Franziska Fichtner studied the function of the sugar-signalling metabolite trehalose 6-phosphate in regulating shoot branching in Arabidopsis and pea for her PhD at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Potsdam-Golm. After graduation she continued working on this theme as a postdoctoral fellow, before moving to Christine Beveridge’s lab at the University of Queensland, where she investigated links between sugar and phytohormone signalling in shoot and root branching. She is now a junior group leader associated with the Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences (CEPLAS) at Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, where she is focussing on how trehalose 6-phosphate and other sugar signalling pathways shape plant architecture.

Dr. Christian Meyer

IJPB INRAE Versailles

I am a Senior PI at the Institut Jean-Pierre Bourgin at INRAE Versailles (France). Our group is studying the role of the Target of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase in Arabidopsis and our present goals are to identify and characterize components of the plant TOR signalling pathway.

Our research is broadly integrative, from genetic to physiological scales and addresses the implication of TOR and its substrates in plant adaptation to the environment.

Prof. Filip Rolland

KU Leuven Plant Institute (LPI)

Filip Rolland received his PhD from the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium), working on glucose sensing and signaling in yeast, and then got his post-doctoral training in Jen Sheen’s lab in Boston (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School), investigating Arabidopsis hexokinase-mediated glucose signaling and SnRK1-mediated metabolic stress signaling. He returned to the KU Leuven Biology department and in 2008 started his own research group to further explore the functions and regulation of the SnRK1 metabolic sensor. Filip is actively involved in teaching, training and outreach and is director of the new interdisciplinary KU Leuven Plant Institute (LPI).    

Dr. Diana Santelia

ETH Zürich

Diana Santelia is a Molecular Plant Physiologist at ETH Zürich, where she leads an independently funded research team. Over the past 15 years, she has been working in the exciting field of starch metabolism. She contributed seminal work on starch and sugar metabolism in stomatal guard cells, a technically challenging topic which stagnated since the 1990s. Her research uncovered the function and regulation of starch turnover in guard cells and its influence on plant productivity and stress tolerance. Diana juggles the responsibilities of family life, a full-time job and a true passion for triathlon.

Prof. Mark Stitt

Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology

Talk title: Thirty-odd Years of Research into Sugar Sensing in Plants

After studying for his Bachelor (1972-75) at Cambridge University UK, Mark stayed to complete his PhD (1975-78) under the supervision of Tom ap Rees. He moved as a Postdoc to the lab of Hans W. Heldt in the LMU Münich (1978-80) and Göttingen University (1980-86). He was Assistant Professor at the University of Bayreuth (1986-90), and then Head of the Botany Department at Heidelberg University (1990-2000). From 2000-2021 he was Director of Department II, Metabolic Networks, of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, Potsdam-Golm. He now leads an emeritus group at the institute. 

Dr. Piers Hemsley

Reader and Principal Investigator , University of Dundee

Piers Hemsley is Reader and Principal Investigator at the University of Dundee and The James Hutton Institute (Scotland). He received a BSc (hons) and PhD from the University of Bristol (UK). His research focusses on membrane protein function and organisation, with a particular focus on regulation by fatty acid based post-translational S-acylation. He established the biochemical and proteomic approaches required to reveal the extent of S-acylation in plants. Recent work has focussed on how S-acylation regulates the activity and outputs of receptor kinases during pathogen attack and hormone perception. Current efforts focus on how S-acylation affects receptor kinase complex formation and lipid environment to promote signalling outputs. The lab also has a keen interest in methods development for studying protein-protein interactions between membrane proteins.

 

Professor Angus Murphy

Professor, University of Maryland

Angus Murphy is a Professor of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture at the University of Maryland. He received a BA (honors) and PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was the Underwood Fellow in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, a University Faculty Scholar at Purdue University. Research in the lab is focused on the processes that control the movement of the phytohormone auxin to regulate programmed and plastic plant development.  Much of the work focuses on how those processes respond to environmental inputs and stress. Current efforts involve integration of light and gravity responses and modification of auxin fluxes by biotic and abiotic stressors. The lab also studies the transport of other aromatic acids that function in plant / fungal growth processes. He uses the tools of structural biology, modelling, biochemistry, cell biology, comparative systems biology, and molecular genetics.

Dr. Wendy Peer

Associate Professor , Department of Environmental Science and Technology

Wendy Peer is an Associate Professor of Plant Biology and Chemical Ecology in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology. She earned B.S. degrees with honors in biology and chemistry from California State University, Bakersfield, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research integrates biochemistry at the cellular level, e.g. auxin homeostasis, flavonoid function, with physiology at the organismal level to apply it on the broader scale in natural, agricultural and built ecosystems.  Her current research focuses on seedling establishment and the integration of developmental and environmental signals that lead to successful seedling establishment and the effects of environmental change that impact seedling establishment and on identifying novel applications for microbial pairings with plant-based food to enhance food quality and nutrition. Elucidating the mechanisms of successful seedling establishment will produce new strategies for food, fuel and environmental sustainability and security.

 

Dr Chai Hao Chiu

University of Cambridge

Chai Hao Chiu performed his undergraduate and PhD studies at the University of Cambridge,with Uta Paszkowski from 2017-2022, where he studied the evolution and function of receptor kinases that regulate arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis. He is now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Giles Oldroyd where he continues his work on the receptors.

Dr Alex Costa

Alex Costa is a professor in Plant Physiology at the Dept of Biosciences at the Università degli Studi di Milano and he is the Scientific Coordinator of the UNIMI Bio-Imaging facility (UNITECH-NOLIMITS). His research interests are aimed at understanding the role of second messengers in the study of how plants do interact with their environment, with attention to understanding the mechanisms through which plants perceive and transduce stresses. His area of expertise consists of the study of calcium signaling using advanced imaging technologies with plants expressing genetically encoded indicators. Alex Costa is an expert in the field of ion transport, confocal and wide-field fluorescence microscopy, design of in vivo imaging analysis, genetically encoded indicators, FRET analysis, and organelles.

Prof. Jose Feijo

University of Maryland

Talk title: "Molecular mechanims of regulation and ion selectivity of Plant Glutamate-receptors"

José Feijó is currently a Professor at the University of Maryland. Research in his group is focused on understanding apical cell growth and morphogenesis, using the pollen tube as a biological model, ion dynamics as an experimental paradigm and theoretical modeling as an integrative tool. His group contributed with novel ion channels and sensors specifically involved in pollen tube biology and reproduction, and other plant biology phenomena. Feijó’s group further pioneered various fields, transcriptomics of plant male gametes and its consequences for plant reproduction and improvement, and the elucidation of signalling through plant-glutamate receptors.

Dr Julien Gronnier

No bio provided

Clara Igisch

Title: Auxin-mediated regulation of Rho GTPase dynamics, nanoclustering, and signaling at the plant plasma membrane

Yvon Jaillais and Clara Igisch, Plant Development and Reproduction (RDP) laboratory.

Yvon Jaillais did his PhD at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon, France) in the group of Thierry Gaude, where he studied the link between intracellular trafficking and polar auxin transport. In 2008, he moved to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, California, USA) to study brassinosteroid signaling in the group of Joanne Chory. He was recruited as a CNRS scientist in 2011 to work in the RDP lab (Lyon). There, Dr. Jaillais started a research program on the role of anionic phospholipids in membrane organization, receptor kinase signaling, and plant development.

Clara Igisch studied in Germany at RWTH Aachen and TU Munich with exchange semesters at NTNU Trondheim, Norway and IISc Bangalore, India. In 2021, she started her PhD  at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon, France) in the group of Dr. Jaillais working on the spatio-temporal regulation of plant Rho GTPase signaling.

Dr Uta Paszkowski

No bio provided

Dr Tonga Xu

Peking University in Beijing, China.

Personal Bio- Tongda Xu received his B.S. degree in Biology from Peking University in Beijing, China. He pursued his Ph. D. at the University of California Riverside. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 2010, he started his research group as a Young Investigator at Temasek Life Science Laboratory Ltd in Singapore. In 2014 he moved to China and is currently a professor and associate director of Haixia Institute of Science and Technology at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University. He identified Transmembrane Kinases (TMK) together with auxin binding protein 1 (ABP1) as an auxin sensing complex at the cell surface that triggers multiple cytosolic auxin responses in plants. Currently, his lab focuses on the detailed mechanisms of how this cell surface auxin signaling pathway determines cell fate in plant development.   

Dr. Andrew Leakey

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Leakey research group at the University of Illinois aims to help improve the productivity, resource use efficiency and stress resilience of food and fuel crops. To do this we integrate genetic, molecular, biochemical, physiological, agronomic, imaging and machine learning tools. Our current focus is to holistically understand the mechanisms controlling stomata, rooting and water use efficiency.  

Dr Leakey received his B.Sc. in Plant Sciences in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Tropical Tree Physiology and Ecology in 2003, both from the University of Sheffield, UK. He moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA as a Fulbright Scholar in 2002. Staying at Illinois he was a post-doctoral scientist in the Department of Plant Biology and then Research Fellow at the Institute for Genomic Biology, before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013 and Professor in 2018. He has received the Calvin-Benson Prize for excellence in early-career research on photosynthesis and been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is currently the Director of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) and the Head of the Department of Plant Biology.

Lab webpage: http://www.life.illinois.edu/leakey/

 

Professor Tracy Lawson

University of Essex

Professor Tracy Lawson is a professor in the Plant Productivity group and Director of Plant Phenotyping at Essex, with over 25 years’ experience in photosynthesis research. Her research focuses on the stomatal control of atmospheric gas entry into the leaf, associated water loss and the mechanisms that regulate this process. Recent research has paid particular attention to stomatal kinetics and the impact of dynamic environments on both photosynthesis and stomatal behaviour. Tracy’s work also concentrates on phenotyping including chlorophyll fluorescence techniques (for quantifying light use and photosynthetic efficiency) and thermal imaging (for measuring stomatal responses and kinetics). Lawson’s lab developed the first imaging system for screening plant water-use-efficiency (McAusland et al., 2013).

 

 

 

Dr. Alex Wu

University of Queensland, Australia

Talk title: Scaling leaf water use efficiency traits to the crop level for supporting crop improvement

Alex conducts research on the physiology and modelling of complex adaptive traits in field crops. Post his PhD at the University of Queensland in 2015, he worked with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational photosynthesis and recently in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success. Alex has been leading the development of cross-scale plant/crop models describing component trait networks underpinning complex agronomic traits and conduct simulations to aid interpretation and prediction of yield outcomes due to genetic and management intervention of crops with a focus on improving yield in rain-fed, often water limited, conditions.

His modelling approach: deepens the understanding of dynamic crop growth and development trajectories and GxExM interactions; enhances the utility of photosynthetic molecular interventions; aids crop genetics and management design for enhanced production in current and future environments.

Alex is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at QAAFI, University of Queensland. He was awarded the prestigious Australian Society of Plant Scientists Peter Goldacre Award.

: @@doc_alexwu

Dr Lorna McAusland

Nottingham University, United Kingdom

Lorna specialises in crop photosynthetic physiology and water-use efficiency. Since gaining her PhD at the University of Essex in 2014, she has been part of three international consortia - RIPE, IWYP and HeDWIC - to enhance photosynthetic efficiency under growing climactic uncertainty. Recently awarded a BBSRC-Discovery Fellowship at the University of Nottingham, Lorna is transitioning from a BBSRC-Newton project studying nocturnal plant processes towards understanding the role of non-foliar photosynthesis in sustaining yields under heat.

Dr Michael Raissig

University of Bern, Switzerland

Talk title: Making better pores - how stomatal form improves stomatal function in grasses

Michael earned his PhD in 2013 in the lab of Ueli Grossniklaus at the University of Zurich studying the epigenetic phenomenon of genomic imprinting during seed development. From 2014 to 2018, he was an SNSF- and LSRF-sponsored postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dominique Bergmann at Stanford University. In Stanford, he started to study how developmental innovations affect the form and function of grass stomata, which are tiny pores through which plants “breathe” and exchange gases with the environment. In 2018, Michael started his independent research group at the Centre for Organismal Studies at Heidelberg University. His lab is using developmental genetics, microscopy and gas-exchange physiology in the wheat relative and grass model Brachypodium distachyon to link stomatal form to function. Since 2022, Michael is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Dr Jessica Dunn

Sheffield University, United Kingdom

Dr Jessica Dunn holds a research fellowship at the Institute for Sustainable Food (University of Sheffield). She is currently interested in how the development and physiology of different leaves on a cereal plant are genetically regulated. Her PhD research focused on hexaploid wheat, and how manipulating the expression of EPIDERMAL PATTERNING FACTOR (EPF) orthologues affects stomatal density and patterning on leaves and non-foliar organs. She explored how this impacts on other aspects of plant development, physiology, and yield. Jess is especially interested in how crop development relates to physiology, and has worked on projects in rice, wheat, soybean, and barley.

Professor Tracy Lawson

University of Essex

Professor Tracy Lawson is a professor in the Plant Productivity group and Director of Plant Phenotyping at Essex, with over 25 years’ experience in photosynthesis research. Her research focuses on the stomatal control of atmospheric gas entry into the leaf, associated water loss and the mechanisms that regulate this process. Recent research has paid particular attention to stomatal kinetics and the impact of dynamic environments on both photosynthesis and stomatal behaviour. Tracy’s work also concentrates on phenotyping including chlorophyll fluorescence techniques (for quantifying light use and photosynthetic efficiency) and thermal imaging (for measuring stomatal responses and kinetics). Lawson’s lab developed the first imaging system for screening plant water-use-efficiency (McAusland et al., 2013).

 

 

 

Dr. Andrew Leakey

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Leakey research group at the University of Illinois aims to help improve the productivity, resource use efficiency and stress resilience of food and fuel crops. To do this we integrate genetic, molecular, biochemical, physiological, agronomic, imaging and machine learning tools. Our current focus is to holistically understand the mechanisms controlling stomata, rooting and water use efficiency.  

Dr Leakey received his B.Sc. in Plant Sciences in 1998 and his Ph.D. in Tropical Tree Physiology and Ecology in 2003, both from the University of Sheffield, UK. He moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA as a Fulbright Scholar in 2002. Staying at Illinois he was a post-doctoral scientist in the Department of Plant Biology and then Research Fellow at the Institute for Genomic Biology, before joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2007. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013 and Professor in 2018. He has received the Calvin-Benson Prize for excellence in early-career research on photosynthesis and been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is currently the Director of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) and the Head of the Department of Plant Biology.

Lab webpage: http://www.life.illinois.edu/leakey/

 

Professor Viktor Žárský

Charles University and the Inst. of Experimental Botany

Viktor Žárský is professor at the Department of experimental plant biology, Charles university in Prague; at the Institute of experimental botany, Czech academy of sciences he established the Laboratory of cell biology (lead now by Martin Potocký). He investigates the biology of plant cell polarity and morphogenesis as an outcome of an integrated network of endomembrane lipids, proteins, and cytoskeleton interactions. Major focus is on small GTPases and their effectors in endomembrane system - especially vesicle tethering complex exocyst in an evolutionary perspective including plant terrestrialization.

 

 

Professor Mike Blatt

University of Glasgow

Mike was educated in the USA and Canada, obtaining a dual BSc with honours from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and his Ph.D. from Stanford University where he studied with Winslow Briggs. He was a Fullbright-Hays Graduate Fellow in Germany, a Fellow of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University Medical School with a National Research Service Award before moving to the University of Cambridge, UK on a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship. Mike was a Lecturer, Reader, and held a Personal Chair at the University of London, Wye College and Imperial College, London. He took up the Regius Chair of Botany at Glasgow University in 2001 by Royal Warrant, where he heads the Plant Science Group of nine academic colleagues and some 50 postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers and technicians. His major interests are plant membrane transporters electrophysiology, membrane vesicles trafficking and stomata regulation. He is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (USA), the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Biology (London), and the James Hutton Institute. He has held a number of advisory roles and serves within the UK and internationally, including as a founding member of the BBSRC panel of experts, external assessor for the Chilean Science Foundation, NASA (USA), and the Swedish Science Directorate. Mike stepped down last year, after three successive terms as Editor-in-Chief of Plant Physiology, in order to focus on research. Even so, he continues to work with the journal on its global Assistant Features Editor program that he introduced to support promising scientists early in their careers.

Dr. Mads Eggert Nielsen

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Mads Eggert Nielsen obtained his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark in collaboration with Carlsberg A/S in 2006. He then joined the lab of Hans Thordal-Christensen at the University of Copenhagen, working on the secretory syntaxin PEN1 and its involvement in plant innate immunity. In 2011, the Carlsberg Foundation supported a two-year stay in the lab of Gerd Jürgens, University of Tübingen, after which he returned to the University of Copenhagen. His interest in membrane trafficking comes from studying immunity in plants, where the main focus is to determine how plants use membrane trafficking to defend themselves against potentially infectious filamentous pathogens. A special interest is on the secretory pathways that lead to the formation of two evolutionarily conserved defense structures, papillae and encasements, which form in response to attack by filamentous pathogens and block or hamper pathogen ingress.

 

 

Dr Martin Potocký

Institute of Experimental Botany, Czech Academy of Science

Martin Potocký began his research career in a joint project between the Institute of Experimental Botany, Czech Academy of Science, and the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague, where he received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 2007. Between 2008 and 2011, he continued his research as a postdoc at the Institute of Experimental Botany. In 2012 he worked as a postdoc in the Department of Biology, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, supported by the EMBO fellowship. After his return to Prague, he was a senior researcher at the Institute of Experimental Botany, and in 2018 he became the head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology, Institute of Experimental Botany, Czech Academy of Science. His primary scientific interests are the functions of plasma membrane lipids, phospholipid modifying enzymes, and the regulatory interplay between membrane lipids and proteins in plant cells.

Dr Rucha Karnik

University of Glasgow

Rucha comes from a Agri-biotech industry (2001-2007). She obtained her PhD in mammalian membrane biology at Leeds University in 2011, during which she elucidated trafficking mechanisms underlying K⁺ channels diseases in humans. She moved to Glasgow for her post doc in 2011 for pursuing related themes of ion transport and membrane traffic in plant systems. She is a Senior Royal Society University Research Fellow (2016-2025) and holds proleptic appointment at the University of Glasgow. Research in Karnik lab centres around addressing the overarching question 'How do plants grow?'. The focus is on elucidating the connections between the membrane traffic and ion transport machinery during pathogenesis and the regulation of membrane traffic by hormones impacting plant growth and development.

Dr Philipp Denninger

TUM, München

Philipp Denninger studied Biology at the University of Regensburg and finished his Masters in 2013 in a joint project in the labs of David Ehrhardt and Wolf Frommer at the Carnegie Institute for Plant Science in Stanford (CA) and with Thomas Dresselhaus at the University of Regensburg, investigating Ca²⁺ signalling during double fertilization of Arabidopsis. During his subsequent Ph.D. project Philipp Denninger studied protein polarization during root hair initiation in the lab of Guido Grossmann at the University of Heidelberg and received his Ph.D. in 2018. From 2018-2019 Philipp Denninger worked as a Post-Doc in the lab of Thomas Dresselhaus and in 2019 moved as a Junior Group Leader to the Chair of Claus Schwechheimer at the Technical University of Munich. Philipp Denningers primary scientific interests are protein polarization and dynamics at the plasma membrane, focusing on RhoGTPase signalling during pollen tube germination.

 

Dr Yohann Boutté

CNRS, France

Yohann Boutté did his PhD thesis at CNRS Paris XI University between 2002 and 2005 under the supervision of Béatrice Satiat-Jeunemaitre, he did two successive post-docs in Sweden, at the Umeå Plant Science Center (UPSC) (2006-2010 and 2010-2012) under the supervision of Markus Grebe and Rishi Bhalerao. He is a CNRS researcher since 2012 and started his own independent group in 2016. His team is aiming at deciphering lipid-dependent mechanisms involved in secretory sorting of proteins to polar domains of the plasma membrane. To reach this goal the team is using state-of-the-art quantitative lipidomics and proteomics on immuno-purified intact pre- and post-Golgi sub-domains in combination with super-resolution confocal imaging, genetics and cell biology approaches. A main achievement of the team was to show that the length of the acyl chain of plant sphingolipids (SL) is critical for polar secretory sorting of the auxin efflux carrier PIN2 from TGN to the apical membrane of root epidermal cells (Wattelet-Boyer et al., Nature Communications, 2016). The team additionally identified a new mechanism acting in PIN2 protein sorting to apical PM. This mechanism involves PIPs-specific phospholipase C (PI-PLC) as a SL-mediated actor of PI4P consumption at the post-Golgi station trans-Golgi Network (TGN) (Ito et al., Nature Communications, 2021).

 

Dr. Mads Eggert Nielsen

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Mads Eggert Nielsen obtained his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Denmark in collaboration with Carlsberg A/S in 2006. He then joined the lab of Hans Thordal-Christensen at the University of Copenhagen, working on the secretory syntaxin PEN1 and its involvement in plant innate immunity. In 2011, the Carlsberg Foundation supported a two-year stay in the lab of Gerd Jürgens, University of Tübingen, after which he returned to the University of Copenhagen. His interest in membrane trafficking comes from studying immunity in plants, where the main focus is to determine how plants use membrane trafficking to defend themselves against potentially infectious filamentous pathogens. A special interest is on the secretory pathways that lead to the formation of two evolutionarily conserved defense structures, papillae and encasements, which form in response to attack by filamentous pathogens and block or hamper pathogen ingress.

 

 

Dr. Liana Acevedo-Siaca

Michigan State University

Liana Acevedo-Siaca is a postdoctoral researcher at the Michigan State University-Department of Energy (MSU-DOE) Plant Research Laboratory (PRL). Her current research focuses on understanding how plants respond to fluctuating light conditions within the context of other abiotic stresses, such as heat. Furthermore, her work aims to connect the fields of plant physiology and breeding by characterizing natural variation, understanding the limitations to photosynthesis, and exploring the amenability for improvement of photosynthetic traits through selection to work towards more resilient crops.

Prior to joining MSU, Acevedo-Siaca completed her graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she focused on plant physiology and photosynthesis in rice in collaboration with the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) Project. During graduate school she spent time at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines as a U.S. Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security. Most recently, Acevedo-Siaca worked at CIMMYT as an Associate Scientist in the Wheat Physiology division of the Global Wheat Program.

Dr Stefan Kepinski

University of Leeds

Stefan Kepinski is a Professor of Plant Development and Head of the School of Biology at the University of Leeds. His research spans the biophysical basis of auxin perception to the understanding of the control of growth angle in plants. His group’s work has led to new ways to increase the sustainability of crop production, including patented technologies for the optimisation of root system architecture. Through this work, he has become engaged in the problem of the decarbonisation of agriculture and the wider food system. He is Associate Director of the Global Food & Environment Institute where he leads research on agriculture and environment through the Leeds Net Zero Agriculture Living Lab. He is also on the Executive Leadership Team of the AgriFood4NetZero Network Plus project (www.agrifood4netzero.net), which aims to envision plausible scenarios for a net zero agri-food system and provide practical pathways to achieving the most optimal of these alternative futures.

Dr. Jana Kholová

International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)

Dr. Jana Kholová is Senior Scientist with the theme System Analysis for Climate Smart Agriculture (SACSA) at ICRISAT, based in Hyderabd/India. With the PhD in Genetics from Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, with specialization in plant genetics and physiology. Her core competencies include dissection of environment-adaptive traits and translating them into high-throughput phenotyping methods, using system modelling tools to characterize target environments and predict the effect of adaptive traits in target agro-ecologies. She is currently coordinating multiple research projects, has published ~ 29 articles (H-index of 14) and has citations exceeding 650 (2017).

Dr. Carolina Rivera-Amado

CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico)

Dr. Carolina Rivera-Amado studied Crop Physiology at the University of Nottingham (UK), focusing on the identification of novel anatomical stem traits associated with increases in fertility in wheat. Right after graduation in 2017, Carolina started her post-doc at CIMMYT in the Global Wheat Program (GWP), where she was in charge to validate sink related traits in the IWYP Hub platform in Mexico (www.iwyp.org). Recently, she assumed co-leadership of pre-breeding activities in the GWP aiming to produce semi elite or semi adapted material with novel expression of traits to increase yield potential and abiotic stress tolerance (heat and drought). Carolina has a great passion for capacity building, training CIMMYT visitors, wheat breeding courses trainees, local and overseas students, local staff in wheat phenotyping and physiology and pre-breeding tools and practices.

Dr. Katharina Schiessl

Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge

Talk Title: GETTING to the ROOT OF SYMBIOTIC ROOT NODULE DEVELOPMENT FOR BIOLOGICAL NITROGEN FIXATION IN PLANTS

 

I am interested in the fundamental question of how the coordination of cell proliferation, cell growth and cell differentiation results in the development of plant organs of specific size, shape and function. I am particularly interested in the gene regulatory networks that direct and coordinate these post-embryonic organogenesis processes and hence generate the enormous diversity we find among plant organs. Recently, I have been more and more intrigued by the fact that plant colonisers such as bacteria, nematodes and insects can recruit these plant endogenous organogenesis pathways for their own benefit and induce and direct the development of costume-built organs that are commonly referred as plant galls.

A very specific case of coloniser-induced organs are symbiotic root nodules that develop on the roots of legumes in response to the infection by beneficial nitrogen-fixing rhizobial bacteria which provide the plant with ammonia in exchange for carbon. These symbiotic nodules are very distinct from lateral roots in morphology and function. In particular, nodules are comprised of cells that can accommodate nitrogen-fixing rhizobial bacteria intracellularly – endo-symbiotically and that provide favourable conditions for the biological nitrogen fixation process.

I did my undergraduate & Master’s degree in Applied Plant Sciences in Vienna, Austria. For my PhD, I joined the group of Prof. Robert Sablowski at the John Innes Centre in Norwich UK as an early career scientist within the  Marie Curie Skłodowska Initial Training Network “Training in Systems Biology Applied to Flowering”. Since 2014, I have been a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Giles Oldroyd within the Engineering the Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa (ENSA) project, investigating the regulatory networks of symbiotic root nodule development. I am currently based at the Sainsbury Laboratory at Cambridge University, UK.

Dr. Wolfgang Busch

Professor, Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California

Wolfgang Busch is Professor and holder of the Hess Chair in Plant Science at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. He furthermore is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University of California, San Diego. Dr. Busch studies genes, genetic networks, and molecular processes that determine root growth and its responses to the environment. He is also the Executive Director of the Salk Harnessing Plants Initiative that develops plant varieties with enhanced carbon sequestration capabilities for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, thereby counteracting climate change.

Dr. Busch studied Biology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and obtained his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. He received his postdoctoral training at Duke University before he joined the Gregor Mendel Institute in Vienna, Austria as a group leader. In 2017, he joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Dr. Busch has published more than 80 scientific papers, many of them in world-leading top scientific journals and received several international awards, including the Genome Web Young Investigator Award in 2014 and the SEB president’s medal in 2015.

Dr. Chris Topp

Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

Christopher Topp is an Associate Member and Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. He was the 2020 President of the North American Plant Phenotyping Network, and a current co-director of the Subterranean Influences on the Nitrogen and Carbon Cycle (SINC) Center. The Topp Lab takes an integrated phenomics approach to the study of root and rhizosphere traits. By integrating these efforts with natural variation and genomics, we focus on new crop and cover crop varieties with root systems tailored to the local environment that enhance drought tolerance, efficient nutrient uptake, and ecosystem services towards sustainable agriculture goals.

Dr Maria Florencia Ercoli

University of California, Davis

Talk title: Rice root system architecture traits that enhance microbial associations and carbon sequestration

Dr Hanna Poffenbarger

University of Kentucky

Dr. Hanna Poffenbarger is an assistant professor of soil nutrient management at University of Kentucky. She studies how carbon and nutrients cycle in soil-crop systems and uses this understanding to develop sustainable soil management practices and resilient production systems. Specific areas of interest include: nutrient capture and release by cover crops, spatiotemporal controls on nitrogen dynamics, optimal fertilization practices for crop yield and quality, and root impacts on soil organic matter formation and persistence. She also teaches Soil Nutrient Management to undergraduate and graduate students at University of Kentucky. Originally from Frederick, MD, she completed her PhD at Iowa State University and has called Kentucky home since 2018

Dr Liz Baggs

University of Edinburgh

Talk title: Do relationships between root traits and soil C dynamics hold the key to enhancing soil C sequestration?  

Liz Baggs is Professor of Food and Environmental Security at the University of Edinburgh. She is Deputy Dean of Research for Strategic Change in the University’s College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, and is also Deputy Director of the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Systems. Prior to this she held the Established Chair of Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen, where she was Head of School of Biological Sciences.

She is a soil biogeochemist, and develops and applies stable isotope approaches to investigate plant-soil interactions. Particular focus is on greenhouse gas production and mitigation in agricultural systems, and the relationships between plant traits and soil C and N cycling in temperate and tropical systems.

Liz holds various current and previous strategic leadership and advisory roles for higher education, research funding and agri-environment strategies, including with UKRI, Scottish Government and international research organisations. She has previously been President of the British Society of Soil Science, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Soil Science.

Dr Stefan Kepinski

University of Leeds

Stefan Kepinski is a Professor of Plant Development and Head of the School of Biology at the University of Leeds. His research spans the biophysical basis of auxin perception to the understanding of the control of growth angle in plants. His group’s work has led to new ways to increase the sustainability of crop production, including patented technologies for the optimisation of root system architecture. Through this work, he has become engaged in the problem of the decarbonisation of agriculture and the wider food system. He is Associate Director of the Global Food & Environment Institute where he leads research on agriculture and environment through the Leeds Net Zero Agriculture Living Lab. He is also on the Executive Leadership Team of the AgriFood4NetZero Network Plus project (www.agrifood4netzero.net), which aims to envision plausible scenarios for a net zero agri-food system and provide practical pathways to achieving the most optimal of these alternative futures.

Dr Maria Fernanda Alvarez

Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT

Maria Fernanda’s main research interest is to develop tools and technologies for the sustainable intensification of the rice crop contributing especially to food security and climate change mitigation.  Maria Fernanda is a biologist by training, from de Los Andes University of Colombia (2000-2005).  She also holds a PhD. in agricultural sciences (genetics and plant breeding) from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2010-2014).  Since August 2019, Maria Fernanda leads the Alliance Bioversity-CIAT rice program, where she is responsible for fostering and promoting the cooperation of a multidisciplinary team to achieve sustainable development of rice crops in a scenario of climate change.  Prior to this, Maria Fernanda led the hybrid rice for Latin America consortium (HIAAL) from CIAT’s rice program, where she designed and implemented the research strategy to develop hybrid rice for Latina America. 

Dr Jennifer Pett-Ridge

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Jennifer Pett-Ridge is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at LLNL, Adjunct Professor at UC Merced and a member of the UC Berkeley Innovative Genomics Institute. She uses the tools of systems biology and biogeochemistry (stable isotope probing, NanoSIMS imaging, molecular microbial ecology, and computational modeling) to make quantitative estimates of microbiome interactions and their effects on ecosystem biogeochemistry. She leads multiple team projects for the US Department of Energy, including the Microbes Persist Soil Microbiome Scientific Focus Area, and the Roads to Removal assessment of carbon dioxide removal options in the USA. Pett-Ridge has received a DOE Early Career award, Secretary of Energy Achievement Award, Geochemical Society Endowed Biogeochemistry Medal, and the DOE Office of Science Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award.

 

 

Dr Thomas Pugh

University of Birmingham

Talk title: Forest carbon sequestration - a matter of dynamics

Tom Pugh works on the interactions between the terrestrial biosphere, atmosphere and human interventions. His research particularly focuses on forest dynamics, trying to quantify how rates of tree growth, death and restablishment are changing across the globe, and what this means for the carbon cycle. He approaches this blending process-based vegetation modelling with large-scale empirical analyses. Tom began his research journey studying atmospheric chemistry above tropical rainforests at Lancaster University, before moving to Karlsruhe Institute of Technology where he was seduced by the challenges of modelling terrestrial vegetation. He now holds the positions of Associate Professor at Lund University, Sweden, and Reader in Biosphere-Atmosphere Exchange at the University of Birmingham, UK. Beyond his core research and teaching activities, he is also active in pushing broad scientific collaboration, particularly through the International Tree Mortality Network (www.tree-mortality.net).

 

 

Dr Kirsten Hofmockel

Pacific Northwest Natiuonal Laboratory

Dr. Kirsten Hofmockel is the Past President of the Soil Ecology Society, an international organization focused on furthering the science, education and awareness of the importance of soils for human and environmental well-being. She serves as a liaison to the U.S. National Committee for Soil Sciences, which advises the National Academies and represents the interests of the U.S. soil science community in the International Union of Soil Sciences. Hofmockel is a Department of Energy Early Career Award recipient for research focused on how plants, microbes and soils interact to influence carbon storage. She is a Sr. Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where she leads the Soil Microbiome Science Focus Area that investigates the basic biology underpinning how soil microbial community members interact to generate beneficial ecosystem functions. Hofmockel holds a joint appointment in the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University.

Dr. Amanda Cavanagh

University of Essex

Dr. Amanda Cavanagh’s research interest in plant environmental physiology covers molecular biology, biochemistry, and leaf physiology. Amanda completed her PhD at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, where she worked on Rubisco - the enzyme that feeds the world. During her postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA, she tested synthetic biology pathways that improve photosynthetic performance in crops under field and environmental stress conditions. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Essex, where her lab explores leaf and plant-level responses to abiotic stress under field and laboratory conditions, and is developing strategies to optimize crop performance in response to the changing climate.

: @@cavycavs @PlantEssex

Professor Giles Johnson

University of Manchester

Giles started out as a biochemist, before switching to plant physiology for his PhD, at the University of Sheffield. Following post-docs in France and Germany, he moved to the University of Manchester. His research focused on plant responses to environmental, mainly abiotic, stress, in particular understanding short term (regulatory) and long term (acclimatory) responses of photosynthesis to changes in the environment. Approaches used include genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and metabolic modelling, combined with gas exchange and in vivo spectroscopy to monitor photosynthetic performance.

Prof. Katie Field

University of Sheffield

Talk title: Plant Fungal symbioses in response to climate change

Prof. Katie Field is a professor of Plant-Soil Processes at the University of Sheffield. Her primary research interests lie in how environmental change over the past 500 million years has driven evolution and functioning of the plant-fungal interactions that now occur in over 80% of plant species, including many staple crops. Katie’s background is in plant and fungal physiology, using field ecology coupled with physiology to untangle how carbon and nutrients are exchanged between crops and their fungi partners and how this may be affected by future changes in climate and management.

Prof. Jeroni Galmes

University of the Balearic Islands (UIB)

Talk title: Leaving the water, coming back in: coevolutionary trends in the CO₂ assimilation of land plants

Born in Sant Llorenç des Cardassar (Mallorca), Jeroni Galmés started in scientific activities in 2001, in the field of the ecophysiology of photosynthesis. In 2006 he defended his doctoral thesis and received a scholarship to carry out his post-doc in Rothamsted Research (UK) and the National University of Australia. He is currently Professor at the Department of Biology of the University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), with teaching responsibilities in the degrees of Agricultural Engineering and the Rural Environment and Biology, as well as in the Master in Applied Biotechnology.

He has participated as a principal investigator in projects financed by regional, state and international agencies, as well as by private sector companies. His research focuses on the responses of plants to abiotic stresses, with emphasis on the exploration of the natural variability of Rubisco and the description of the environmental factors shaping Rubisco performance.

Recently, he dedicated part of his time in scientific expeditions to investigate the ecophysiology of photosynthesis in harsh ecosystems of the Antarctica and the Andes

Dr. Marjorie Lundgren

Lancaster University

Talk title: C2 Photosynthesis and a changing environment

Dr. Marjorie Lundgren is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Research Fellow in Environmental Physiology within the Plant & Crop Science group in the Lancaster Environment Centre. Marjorie applies plant ecophysiology and phylogeographic methods to understand how diverse photosynthetic systems evolve. She is particularly interested in C3-C4 intermediate phenotypes and C2 photosynthesis.

: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/lundgrenlab/
: @Marj_Lundgren

Dr. Caitlin Moore

University of Western Australia

Talk title: Scaling plant processes from enzymes to ecosystems

Dr. Caitlin Moore is interested in research that brings together measurement and modelling techniques to observe how plant processes, from enzymes to ecosystems, change over time and space. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia (2020-current), where she is combining her interests in native and agricultural ecosystem processes to understand how these systems in Australia respond to climate variability over time and space.

Caitlin established her foundations in this field during her PhD at Monash University in Australia (2012-2017), where she quantified tropical savanna tree and grass productivity and phenology. She expanded her skills through her Postdoctoral Researcher appointment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, 2017-2020) in the USA. There she worked in the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) on quantifying the sustainability of bioenergy crops grown in the United States, and on the Water Efficient Sorghum Technologies (WEST) project to build knowledge about agricultural systems and how to measure them in a high-throughput way. She also collaborated on projects aimed at improving food security in the coming century, such as the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project.

Prof. Colin Osborne

University of Sheffield

Talk title: CO₂-fertilization in savannas: interpreting field observations with experimental data

Colin Osborne is Professor of Plant Biology, and Head of Plants, Photosynthesis and Soil at the University of Sheffield. His research aims to understand how ecological processes drive the evolution of plant function in wild and domesticated species. The work makes inferences about convergent evolution by comparing large numbers of species within a phylogenetic framework. Experiments on C₄ photosynthesis have shown how this physiological innovation overcame environmental constraints and changed the ecological behaviour of grass species. Further work has shown how the characteristics of individual grass species affect the sorting of diversity across climate gradients. The influence of CO₂-fertilization on plant function has been a long-standing interest, particularly in tropical savannas, where C₃ trees are expected to be impacted differently to C₃ trees. Current research seeks to understand how increasing CO₂ is changing savanna plant communities, by synthesising evidence from manipulation experiments, long-term field observations and land-surface modelling.

Dr. Mauricio Tejera Nieves

Michigan State University

Talk title: “Seasonal Source-sink dynamics in switchgrass”

Mauricio Tejera-Nieves is a Postdoctoral Research Associate within the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) based at Michigan State University. His current research focuses on the physiology of perennial grasses and how they adjust their source-sink activities to changing environmental conditions to achieve longevity. He is particularly interested in how water-deficit conditions affect the cross talk between rhizome reserves and leaf photosynthesis and how this can be applied to increase biomass production and ethanol conversion. To this end he combines metabolic fluxes and transcriptomics analysis to identify regulatory networks.

Prior to joining the GLBRC and Michigan State University, Mauricio completed his PhD in Crop Production and Physiology at Iowa State University focusing on the interaction of aging and nitrogen limitation. He realized his B.S. and M.S. in Ecology and Statistics from the Universidad de la República de Uruguay concentrating on the interspecific interaction of warm season perennial grasses and legumes.

Dr. Philippa Borrill

John Innes Centre

No bio provided

Dr. Annis Richardson

University of Edinburgh

No bio provided

Prof. Sam Leiboff

Oregon State University

Talk title: The secret genetics of veins

Sam Leiboff is an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology. His lab works on understanding mechanisms of plant cell fate acquisition and maintenance using maize natural diversity and genetic mutants. Folks from the Leiboff Lab use machine learning to process complex phenotypes then experiment with plant cells as intact tissues or at the single cell level in microfluidics and other culture systems.

Dr. Sarah McKim

University of Dundee

Talk title: Facing Forwards: coordination of epidermal traits in barley 

Sarah McKim did her PhD in Arabidopsis molecular developmental genetics at the University of British Columbia with Prof George Haughn. Following a post-doc at the University of Oxford where she examined the molecular mechanisms of floral variation, Sarah started her own group in 2013 at the University of Dundee using barley as a powerful model, underpinned by exploitation and generation of enabling technologies, to understand how cereals grow and develop. Now a Principal Investigator and Senior Lecturer, Sarah leads an internationally competitive research team which has discovered genes and mechanisms controlling important architectural and agronomic traits, such as stem elongation, spike density, branching and grain size and shape. Her recent research investigates the development of protective epidermal surfaces, how developmental regulators influence responses to climate change, and mechanisms controlling grain development and quality.

Dr. Hilde Nelissen

University of Ghent

Hilde Nelissen is group leader at the Center for Plant Systems Biology at the VIB and Ghent University.  Her research career has focused on the central biological question: How do growth processes determine final plant organ size? Initially, she approached this using molecular biology studying Arabidopsis leaf development. As her interest shifted towards applied research, Hilde redirected her focus to maize. What started as translational research to bring knowledge from Arabidopsis to crops and from the lab to the field, gradually developed into a research line with the goal to decipher the instructor networks that govern leaf size, organ growth and ultimately yield in maize. Because plant organ size control is an important yield component that is also severely impacted by climate change, the teams ultimate goal is to deepen our understanding of the growth regulatory networks to achieve climate resilient crops. To address these biological questions, the team implements a range of molecular and phenotyping technologies, including multiplex genome editing, single cell and spatial transcriptomics.

Dr. Jun Xiao

Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)

Talk title: Understanding wheat spike development from systematic view at single-cell resolution

Dr. Jun Xiao is a Principle Investigator in the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and a professor of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also a group leader of CEPAMs, a joint center from John Innes Center and CAS. He serves as independent faculty member for Faculty 1000, and a member of the editorial board of Scientific Reports. He got his PhD degree in developmental biology in the Institute of Botany, CAS in 2013 and did post-doc training in epigenetics in the University of Pennsylvania till 2018. He is engaged in the research of functional genomics of wheat, focusing on the development process of important tissues related to crop yield, such as inflorescence and seeds. He has made series of progress in epigenetic regulation of plant development and adaptation to environments. Some of the works have been published in Nature, Nature genetics, Genome Biology, Molecular Plant, Nature Communications.

Dr. Ricarda Jost

La Trobe University

Ricarda is a senior researcher in the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded Industrial Transformation Research Hub (ITRH) for Medicinal Agriculture at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She has a long-standing interest in plant nutrition, in particular nutrient sensing and signalling. She has studied molecular aspects of delayed greening and phosphate uptake kinetics for survival of plants in severely nutrient impoverished environments. In Arabidopsis, she has elucidated the role of phosphorus status sensing SPX DOMAIN CONTAINING PROTEIN4 (SPX4) interacting with MYB transcription factors during different stages of plant development and under varying nutrient supplies. Her current work focuses on the physiological and molecular characterisation of nutrient use in different Cannabis sativa L. genotypes, ranging from hemp to medicinal cultivars.

Ricarda studied Biology in Germany with a Master’s Degree from the Ruhr-University of Bochum and a PhD from the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

Dr Susanne Schilling

Assistant Professor, School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin

Susanne studied Biology and did her Undergrad Degree and PhD in Genetics at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, where she studied the molecular evolution of a plant transcription factor family involved in key developmental processes in cultivated and wild rice, Arabidopsis and Solanaceae.

Susanne is working on the genetics and cultivation of different crops, mainly hemp and wheat. Her main interests extend from molecular evolution, genome evolution and phylogenetics to domestication and plant cultivation. For this, she is employing molecular biology, next generation sequencing and plant phenotyping technologies.

Prof Gary J Loake

Founder, chairman and CSO , Green Bioactives

Gary is interested in plant immunity and the cognate production and regulation of immune-related natural product molecules. He obtained his PhD from the University of Durham, UK, followed by a Salk-Noble Postdoctoral Fellowship, enabling him to pursue research at the Noble Foundation, Oklahoma USA with Rick Dixon (NAS) and subsequently the Salk Institute, California with Chris Lamb (FRS, CBE). Gary then returned to the UK to work with Professor Diana Bowles (OBE) at the University of York. Subsequently, he took-up a faculty position at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now Professor of Plant Molecular Sciences and is also a member of the Zhejiang University-University of Edinburgh Joint Research Centre for Engineering Biology (JRCEB) in Haining. Gary is a former President of the International Society of Plant Reactive Oxygen and Nitrogen Species, co-founder of the Scottish Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBioIC) and is founder, chairman and CSO of Green Bioactives. He has been a member of numerous institutional strategic advisory groups and grant boards. Gary has published ~140 publications with many in high profile journals.

 

 

Prof. Luisa Trindade

Wageningen University

Prof. Dr. Luisa M. Trindade is a full professor and group leader of the Biobased Economy team at Wageningen University& Research. She leads a team at the Plant Breeding department that focuses on genetics and breeding of crops for a Circular and Biobased Economy. One major line of research is plant cell walls and genetics and breeding of fibre crops, including hemp and miscanthus. She has over 100 publications in highly ranked journals.

Dr. Steven Cooke

The Journal of Conservation Physiology

Steven J. Cooke, Short Bio.  Cooke is a professor of environmental science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.  He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Conservation Physiology.  Much of his work is centred on using physiological tools to study how wild fish respond to different human activities and testing various conservation solutions.

 

Dr. Christine Madliger

University of Windsor

Madliger is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada. Her research program focuses on determining how environmental change impacts stress physiology, behaviour, and fitness in birds and fishes, with a particular emphasis on applications for conservation science. She is also an Associate Editor for Conservation Physiology.

Dr. Kevin Hultine

Desert Biological Garden

Kevin R Hultine. Hultine is the Director of Research at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. He is also the Plant Science Editor of Conservation Physiology. His work investigates ecophysiological traits that underlie plant adaptation to heat waves, drought and other stressors.

 

Dr. Jodie Rummer

James Cook University

Rummer is a professor of marine biology at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. She and her team research the effects of climate change and other Anthropogenic stressors on physiological performance of coral reef fishes, including sharks and rays, with implications toward adaptation and conservation. She is also an associate editor for Conservation Physiology and editor for the section, Conservation Physiology in Action.

Professor Johannes Overgaard

Aarhus University

Johannes Overgaard earned his PhD (2003) from the Arhus University where he also works as Professor at the section for Zoophysiology. Johannes Overgaard current research is primarily concerned with heat and cold tolerance in insects where he studies the consequences of extreme temperature at the cellular, organ, organismal and population level.

Dr. Michael Berenbrink

University of Liverpool

Michael is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Behaviour at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. He obtained a doctorate in Natural Sciences at Düsseldorf University, Germany, then worked as Assistant Professor at Humboldt University, Berlin, before accepting his current position in Liverpool. Michael’s primary research interests lie in the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology of Animals, where he uses the vertebrate oxygen transport chain as a model system for studying the evolution of mechanisms of environmental adaptation. He serves on the editorial board of four journals and has delivered over 40 invited presentations across the world.

Prof. Andrew Biewener

Harvard University

Over the past five decades, the SEB has provided an exciting and critically important forum for sharing ground-breaking research on the aerodynamics of invertebrate and vertebrate animal flight, animal flight performance in relation to migration, and the morphology, physiology and dynamics of muscle contractile function that provides the mechanical power output for flight. Highlights of novel research discoveries underlying animal flight performance will be briefly reviewed and linked to the neuromuscular function of flight muscles that power vertebrate flapping flight. High-speed video, robotic models, particle imaging of fluid flow, computational fluid dynamics modelling, and in vivo methods for recording muscle function have all been key approaches to gaining critical insight into the aerodynamic mechanisms and the muscle power output requirements for flight. Newly emerging techniques and technologies provide the opportunity to explore animal flight performance in the field, offering a rich set of future discoveries linked to the ecology of our changing world. 

Prof. Leslie Buck

University of Toronto

The mammalian brain only survives a few minutes without oxygen, but the turtle brain of freshwater painted and red-eared slide turtles survives many hours to months without oxygen.  The foundation of our current knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of this ability lies at the confluence of four remarkable scientific careers in the 1960’s.  At Duke University the famed comparative physiologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen established his research laboratory and attracted the attention of Peter Hochacka, Donald Jackson and Peter Lutz.  Jackson made the first calorimetric measurements of a reversible metabolic arrest in the Schmidt-Nielsen Lab in 1966, subsequently Lutz demonstrated the maintenance of ion gradients in anoxic turtle brain and Hochachka explored mechanisms of metabolic arrest and formulated the metabolic and ion channel arrest concepts.   “On the shoulders” of these individuals I have advanced my own research on anoxia-tolerant turtle brain and have uncovered evidence of ion channel arrest and in a special case of enhanced ion channel activity.  I will give an overview of this evidence and show recent data showing ion channel arrest in turtle liver cells.

Dr. Andreas Fahlman

L'Oceanogràfic

In 1940, Per Scholander published his seminal paper “Experimental investigations on the respiratory function in diving mammals and birds” that summarized much of the understanding about the physiological responses and adaptations of species that breath-hold dive. While some of the physiological responses had been described earlier, Scholanders treatise provided a unifying summary of the cardiorespiratory responses while diving. This included the dive response, with a reduced cardiac output conserving blood oxygen to the central organs. Scholander also proposed that the anatomy of the respiratory system would aid in alveolar collapse and cessation of gas exchange at depth. Development of miniature-electronics that could measure and record physiological function (i.e., Physio-logging) allowed pioneering field studies by several researchers, e.g Gerry Kooyman. These studies showed that although the dive response was present in free-ranging animals, it was highly variable and seldom as pronounced as during forced dives, suggesting that dive adapted animals have a conditioned capacity to vary heart rate. Physio-logging also provided evidence of alveolar collapse in seals and dolphins, where alveolar compression occurs at shallow depths while complete atelectasis much deeper. The combination of these past studies provided evidence for the “selective gas exchange hypothesis” which provides an explanation how breath-hold diving species manage gases while diving, and how man-made disturbance and climate change may alter this ability. This presentation will provide a summary of the work that followed Scholanders publication and present our current knowledge 83 years later. 

Prof. Andrea Fuller

University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Andrea Fuller is a professor in the School of Physiology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her primary research focus is in the area of wildlife conservation physiology, with two main themes: understanding the physiological plasticity available to mammals to cope with climate change; and improving the physiological welfare of mammals during conservation management practices. Since 2007 she has directed the Brain Function Research Group, which carries out research in the fields of sleep, fever, pain, thermal and wildlife conservation physiology. She has published over 140 peer-reviewed publications, hosted eight postdoctoral fellows, and supervised 37 Doctoral and Masters students. She is the Chair of the Commission on Comparative Physiology for the International Union of Physiological Sciences and an associate editor of the journal Conservation Physiology. In recognition of her contribution to science in South Africa, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa in 2020.

 

Dr. William Joyce

Spanish National Cardiovascular Research Centre

William Joyce received his BSc in Zoology from the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) and PhD in Bioscience from Aarhus University (Denmark). During his doctorate he studied the regulation of cardiac filling in reptiles and fishes. In his postdoctoral career he continued to investigate the evolution of the heart and cardiac proteins at the University of Ottawa (Canada), University of Manchester, and Aarhus University. He now works as a senior postdoc at the Spanish National Cardiovascular Research Centre (through a contract held with CIBER; Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red) studying sarcomeric proteins, adrenergic signalling, and cardiac metabolism.

Prof. Philip Matthews

University of British Columbia

Besides teleost fish, only one other group of aquatic animals has evolved the ability to control their buoyancy using compressible gas-filled bladders: the larvae of the phantom midge (Chaoborus). By the early 1900s, studies had revealed that fish release oxygen from haemoglobin in their blood to inflate their swim bladder, and shrink it by absorbing oxygen back into their blood. While the similarity between the function of the swim bladder of a fish and the four tiny air-sacs of a Chaoborus larva had long been noted, the absence of haemoglobin in these near-transparent insects suggested the presence of a very different buoyancy control mechanism. August Krogh tackled this problem in 1911, ruling out oxygen secretion but failing to identify the actual mechanism. Developments in knowledge and techniques across a range of disparate fields in the intervening 100 years have made it possible to finally characterise the unique buoyancy control system of Chaoborus. 

Prof Julian Dow

In terms of species, insects are the most diverse Class of life. They are able to exploit a remarkable range of ecological niches, and their survival depends on their ability to regulate their internal enviroments in the face of extreme challenges, which are addressed with modifications on the same basic body plan. This talk will review some of the diversity of osmoregulatory strategies in Class Insecta, with particular reference to the structure and function of the Malpighian (renal) tubules and the alimentary canal. 

Dr. Rachael Morgan

University of Bergen

I am an ecophysiologist based at the University of Bergen, Norway. I am interested in understanding how fish can cope during extreme climate-related events (e.g. severe hypoxia, and heat waves). In my current postdoc I am combing fieldwork with lab experiments to investigate how large daily fluctuations in oxygen affect the physiology and behaviour of coral reef fish.

Dr. Pauline Provini

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

How do animals move and interact with their environment? How do they achieve critical functions like locomotion, feeding, or communication? Biomechanics seeks to answer these questions by combining experimental observations with mechanical and mathematical modelling, allowing researchers to gain insights into the mechanics of animal movement. Over the years, musculoskeletal biomechanics, studying how muscles, bones, joints, and tendons work together to produce motion, has made significant conceptual leaps, often linked to technical and modelling advances. In this talk, I will highlight some of the significant historical milestones in biomechanics, and showcase pioneering figures who paved the way for the latest cutting-edge research. By understanding their ideas and methods, we can appreciate how they have helped to shape our understanding of animal movement and more generally of the evolution and diversity of animal form and function, a central theme at SEB for the past decades. 

 

Prof. Suvi Ruuskanen

University of Jyväskylä

Dr. Suvi Ruuskanen is currently an Associate Professor in Environmental Physiology at the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, University of Jyväskylä. Her research is at the intersection of environmental sciences and ecological, physiological and molecular ecology.  Dr. Ruuskanen is broadly interested in the mechanisms underlying organismal adaptation to environmental changes, including the role of transgenerational (incl maternal and paternal effects) and developmental plasticity. Her research currently has a strong focus on  host-microbiome interactions, to understand the causes and consequences of variation in gut microbiome, from molecular mechanisms to evolutionary patterns. These questions are being addressed in avian study systems.

Prof. Holly Shiels

University of Manchester

The work of Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley at the Physiological Laboratory in Cambridge and the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth revolutionised our understanding of cell excitability and garnered them the 1963 Nobel Prize. Their legacy is our comprehension of how voltage-gated ion channels give rise to action potentials both experimentally and mathematically. Experimentally they developed the voltage-clamp technique and established the field of electrophysiology.  By utilising giant axons from squid their work forms a classic example of the August Krogh principal.  Mathematically, the equations they derived from their experimental work represents the first quantitative description of electrical excitability in cells and set the foundation for the coupling of experimental and computational science.  The Hodgkin-Huxley model still forms the basis of computational modelling of excitable cells today.  This talk will reflect on these historic contributions and then demonstrate their relevance for some of the most important questions in physiology and biology today: from what goes wrong with propagation of excitation at environmental extremes to the integration of life across levels of biological organisation

Prof. Trish Shulte

University of British Columbia

This centenary year for the Journal of Experimental Biology is also the 50^th anniversary of the publication of “Strategies of Biochemical Adaptation”, which is the first of several books by Peter Hochachka and George Somero that were instrumental in founding the field of comparative biochemistry. In developing this new field, they took the philosophy and approaches of comparative physiology and applied them to questions at the biochemical level, resulting in a deeply integrative discipline that attempts to understand organismal function from the molecular level upwards. In this talk, I will look back at the fundamental insights developed by Hochachka and Somero and the key questions that they posed, and highlight how recent advances in genomics and genome editing mean that we are now poised to address these questions in exciting new ways.  

 

Dr. Laura Stidsholt

Aarhus University

All animals rely on sensing to survive. Approximately one in five mammals use echolocation as their primary sensory modality to navigate and locate food in total darkness. As small, nocturnal fliers, echolocating bats have a high metabolic rate that must be sustained by targeting small and often highly agile prey. Since Spallanzani's pioneering experiments in the 18th century, scientists have been intrigued by how bats hunt using only their voice and ears. Throughout the 20^th century, bat echolocation and sound perception were explored intensively, particularly through captive behavioural and neurophysiological experiments that laid the foundation for exploring animal cognition and sensory perception, thanks to the work of Donald Griffin. Recent technological advancements, including radio tracking, GPS, and sensor loggers, have facilitated direct measurements of the movement, physiology, foraging, and fine-scale sensory-motor behaviour of wild bats. These developments have allowed us to understand how bats use echolocation to capture enough food to maintain their high energy requirements in the wild, and how their sensory and foraging behaviour is adapted to a changing world. With this talk, I will trace the evolution of bat echolocation research from Spallanzani to the present day, and explore how bats, which evolved their biosonar in a silent and dark world, are facing challenges from human encroachment in natural ecosystems, which are affecting their ability to maintain a positive energy balance in a modern world. 

 

Prof. Jamie Voyles

University of Nevada, Reno

How do epidemics end? A transition away from the outbreak phase of a disease can occur following the emergence of highly pathogenic infectious agents. Yet the mechanisms that underpin such transitions remain obscure. We have been investigating shifts in disease dynamics in the lethal disease amphibian chytridiomycosis by focusing on host recoveries in the amphibian assemblages of Central America. The fungal pathogen that causes chytridiomycosis, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), spread through Costa Rica and Panama in a wave-like pattern approximately two decades ago, causing mass mortality events and severe declines in many amphibian species. However, some host populations that survived initial outbreaks are persisting and even rebounding despite Bd infection. We have found that infection patterns are heterogenous across populations, species, and geographical space. In some species, Bd prevalence and intensity of infection is now low, yet the pathogenicity of Bd isolates is still high, causing 100% mortality in naive hosts in controlled laboratory experiments. This finding suggests that shifts in host resistance and/or tolerance to Bd infection may be important mechanisms underpinning amphibian recoveries and ecological resilience. We also expect that focusing research efforts on other host traits, including innate and adaptive immune responses, the cutaneous microbiome, life history characteristics, and behaviour may offer promising avenues for further investigation to understand the mechanisms underpinning shifts in disease dynamics across spatial-temporal gradients. 

Prof. Tobias Wang

Aarhus University

No bio provided

Prof. Rod Wilson

University of Exeter

No bio provided

Dr Tom Daniel

Two groundbreaking papers published in 1954, led by Andrew Huxley, laid out the theory of the mechanism of muscle contraction based on molecular interactions between myofilaments in the sarcomere that cause filaments to slide past one another during muscle contraction.  These and subsequent papers established the classic “sliding filament hypothesis”.   In the subsequent decades of research, new computational and experimental approaches have allowed us to understand this complex multi-scale process, from force generation to energy delivery at the molecular, cellular and tissue levels of organization.  The vast swath of research in this domain underlies our understanding of animal movement, human disease, and biomimetic technologies.  And, as it turns out, new data suggest that the filaments not only slide, they stretch and dilate as well.  These additional axial and radial motions have profound implications to how energy may be stored and how substrates may be delivered via diffusion and fluid motions.  Both historical and current approaches of this fundamental biomechanical process will be explored, with a focus on the complex dynamics of the myofilament lattice and new ideas emerging about multi-scale physics. 

David Evans

I also lead the Cell Biology section of the SEB. I am Emeritus Professor and member of the Plant Cell Biology Research Group at Oxford Brookes University. The SEB has been central to my research career over more than 40 years - I gave my first public talk as a PhD student at an SEB meeting and have been an active SEB member ever since. For the last 20 years, I have specialised in the study of the plant nuclear envelope, nuclear structure and dynamics and have led, co-organised and contributed to the development of this area in the SEB.

Dr Verena Kreichbaumer

Oxford Brookes University

I am a plant cell biologist and protein biochemist with expertise in the structure and function of the plant endoplasmic reticulum, membrane proteins and auxin biosynthesis.

I carried out my PhD work at the Technical University of Munich where I studied the nitrilase pathway in maize auxin biosynthesis and the maize tryptophan synthase complex. A short-term postdoctoral position at Oxford Brookes allowed me to expand my expertise to ER and Golgi as well as acquiring skills in live cell imaging. I further investigated the targeting of tail-anchored proteins as a postdoc at Sheffield Hallam University. Here, I also applied total internal reflection ellipsometry to quantify protein-membrane interactions on native plant membranes and human cell lines.

I took up a position at Oxford Brookes in 2012 investigating the role of reticulon proteins in ER tubulation and viral trafficking, followed by work on producing the methanotroph pMMO enzyme complex in plants. In 2017, I was appointed as the Vice Chancellors Research Fellow in Biology at Oxford Brookes and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020.

My current projects include structure and dynamics of the ER, ER exit sites, methane detoxification, the ER-nuclear envelope interface and investigating plant glycosylation for the production of therapeutics.

Prof. Jim Murray

Cardiff University

Jim Murray is Professor and Head of School at the Cardiff University School of Biosciences. He has long standing research interests in the plant cell cycle, identifying the D-type cyclin family in plants, and in molecular diagnostics using bioluminescence. After spending 20 years in the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge where he was Professor of Molecular Biotechnology, he moved to Cardiff University in 2008.  He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and of the Academia Europaea, and a co-founder of the diagnostics company Lumora Ltd, for which he was named BBSRC Commercial Innovator of the Year in 2012.  

Prof. Stephen Long

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Abstract:

“Photosynthesis in the SEB yesterday, today and tomorrow - from molecular to global sustainability solutions”

Photosynthesis is the most important process on the planet.  Indeed, it has made much of what the planet is today.  Directly or indirectly it provides all of our food, and fuels almost all ecosystems.  The SEB has been party to much of the discovery of how it works and advances in its measurement and analysis from molecules to landscapes.  Presidents, Medalists, Woolhouse Lecturers and PEPG have been and are major contributors, as I will illustrate.  Discovery and technical progress has expanded in two directions.  1) Growth in food demand is outstripping growth in production, reversing this situation is critical to avoiding increasing starvation and expansion of agriculture into tropical forests.  For our major crops improving photosynthesis appears the remaining option for increasing genetic yield potential.  Elucidation of the underlying gene expression networks and metabolic flux analysis are guiding engineering, including editing, of amounts and forms of key proteins to improve photosynthetic efficiency under global change.  This has already led to on farm demonstrations of increased yield and promises many more.  2) The need to understand sinks for CO₂ has motivated improved measurement and analysis of photosynthesis at scale.  This is critical to identifying sinks and the engineering of managed systems for improved sequestration.  Afforestation and planting of other sustainable productive perennials are providing means to offset emissions.  These though could be greatly enhanced by engineering and breeding increased photosynthetic efficiency, especially if combined with combustion carbon capture and storage.    Going forward photosynthesis may never have been more important.

Biography:

Steve Long holds the Ikenberry University Chair of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences. His photosynthesis research spans from carbon metabolism to field crops; with a focus on breeding and bioengineering for sustainable yield increases under global change. Last year his teams in silico and subsequent in vivo engineering of photosynthesis led to a more than 25% increase in soybean yields in replicated field trials.  He is Founding and Chief Editor of the journals Global Change Biology and Global Change Biology-Bioenergy, and has given briefings on global food security and on bioenergy to the President at the White House, the Vatican and Bill Gates.  He first joined the SEB as an undergraduate, is a past convener of Plant Environmental Physiology Group and session organizer, and is a member of the Plant Section Committee.  He was the 2008 Woolhouse Lecturer.