Cathie Martin

Cathie Martin researches into the relationship between diet and health and how crops can be fortified to improve diets and address the global challenge of escalating chronic disease. This work has involved linking leading clinical and epidemiological researchers with plant breeders and metabolic engineers to develop scientific understanding of how diet can help to maintain health, promote healthy ageing and reduce the risk of chronic disease.

Cathie has recently initiated collaborative research in China to research on Chinese Medicinal Plants, particularly those producing anti-cancer metabolites used for complementary therapies.

Cathie was Editor-in-Chief of The Plant Cell (2008-2014) and is now an Associate Editor for Molecular Horticulture. She is a member of EMBO, AAAS, a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 2014 she was awarded an MBE for services to Plant Biotechnology, in 2019 she was elected Janniki Ammal Chair of the Indian Academy of Sciences for outstanding women in science and in 2022 she was awarded the Rank Prize for outstanding contributions to research on nutrition.

Detlef Weigel

Detlef Weigel, a German-American scientist, is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Royal Society, and a recipient of several scientific awards, most recently the Novozymes Prize of the Novo Nordisk Foundation and the Stephen Hales Prize of the American Association of Plant Biologists. He is among the ten most highly cited plant scientists in the world. The first major finding from his lab was that an Arabidopsis gene could dramatically accelerate flowering of trees; this established a proof of concept for Arabidopsis genetics as a platform for biotechnological discoveries. Later on, Detlef was one of the first to exploit natural genetic variation for understanding how the environment affects plant development. In recent years, this work has come to incorporate questions at the interface of evolution and ecology: How can wild plants adapt to climate change, and how do they manage to keep their pathogens at bay? In this research, he draws on the fruits of a collaborative effort initiated over a decade ago to sequence the genomes of over 1,000 natural A. thaliana strains (The 1001 Genomes Project). Detlef has an extensive record of service to the scientific community, having served on a series of editorial and advisory boards. He is a co-founder of three biotech startups.

Andrew Allan

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.

Julia Bailey-Serres

Julia Bailey-Serres is University Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Director of the Center for Plant Cell Biology at the University of California, Riverside. She currently holds a University of California MacArthur Foundation Chair. Bailey-Serres is known for her research on plant adaptive responses to environmental stresses. She is recognized for the in-depth dissection of the function of the SUBMERGENCE 1A gene, responsible for survival of rice plants under prolonged submergence as evidenced by its successful use in stabilizing rice grain yield in flood-prone regions of Asia. Her research defines how plants sense a deficiency in oxygen or energy. She has pioneered technologies to uncover mechanisms of gene regulation in specific cell types of multicellular organisms, particularly in the realm of mRNA translation. Her current research seeks to understand the gene regulatory circuitry that allows key crops to acclimatize to water extremes and nutrient limitation. These investigations provide solutions for global food security. Bailey-Serres was born and raised in California, graduated from the University of Utah with a BS in biology, and the University of Edinburgh with a PhD in botany. She began to work on plant gene regulation during water extreme stress as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. She has mentored over 20 postdoctoral researchers and 20 doctoral students. She developed and directed two interdisciplinary graduate training programs funded by the National Science Foundation. The current Plants3D program fosters entrepreneurship between plant biologists and engineers. Bailey-Serres is an elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2016), American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), and American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB, 2010). She has served as Secretary for ASPB and as Associate editor for journals including Plant Physiology and PNAS. Her recognitions include the 2009 USDA CSREES National Research Initiatives Discovery Award for Outstanding Agricultural Research, Stephen Hales Prize (ASPB, 2017) and Highly Cited Researcher in Plant & Animal Science, Clarivate Analytics (top 1% in field; 2014-2023).

Richard Macknight

Richard is a highly accomplished plant molecular-geneticist with three decades of experience in academic research. As a Professor in the Biochemistry department at the University of Otago in New Zealand, he leads a laboratory that has made significant contributions to the field of plant genetics. His research focuses on the genes that control plant reproduction and development, and he works closely with other scientists to translate this knowledge into practical applications for crop plants. His interest in uORFs and the translational control of gene expression started with the discovery of a uORF controlling vitamin C production while he had a part time appointment at Plant & Food Research Ltd.

Jonathan Jones

Jonathan is a Professor at The Sainsbury Laboratory in the UK. He is a world-renowned expert in plant genetics and worked in industry early in his career, prior to being appointed to his current position. Jonathan has extensive experience in the crop biotechnology sector and is a keen advocate of the application of modern techniques to improve crop yield and quality. He has previously co-founded two other companies: Mendel Biotechnology and Norfolk Plant Sciences. Jonathan’s current research interests focus on the genetic regulation of plant responses to pathogens and the development of crops that are resistant to disease.

Jonathan has been active in plant and microbial science since 1976. After a PhD at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, he undertook postdoctoral work with Professor Fred Ausubel at Harvard before working with Dr John Bedbrook at AGS Inc, the first agbiotech company to go public, where he advanced Agrobacterium-based methods and discoveries. Since 1988, his group at the Sainsbury Lab in Norwich UK has contributed major discoveries in plant immunity and he is leading efforts to use this knowledge to reduce crop losses to disease. Jonathan was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003 and has been an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 2015.