Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland, Australia

Dr Hickey is a plant breeder and crop geneticist within the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation at The University of Queensland, Australia. He leads an innovative team conducting discovery and applied research on Australia’s most important cereal crops, wheat and barley. This includes understanding the genetics of key traits like drought adaptation and disease resistance, plus the development of novel technologies to assist plant breeders. Dr Hickey has played a pivotal role in the integration of leading-edge breeding technologies, such as the rapid generation advance technology ‘speed breeding’ with genomic selection and genome editing. His advice for speed breeding crops is sought internationally and the technology is now adopted by plant breeding programs worldwide, which is fast-tracking development of improved crop varieties for farmers. His research outcomes have featured in 57 refereed publications, including articles in high profile journals Nature Plants, Nature Protocols and Nature Biotechnology. Lee is a prolific science communicator and his research outcomes have appeared in mainstream media such as BBC World News, National Geographic, and the New York Times. He is passionate about training the next generation of plant breeders and currently mentors 10 PhD students, while 9 of his previous graduates now work for leading plant breeding companies and high-profile research institutes around the globe.

Professor, University of Oxford, UK

Greger Larson received his bachelor's degree in 1996 from Claremont McKenna College, a small liberal arts college in California. He read just about everything Stephen J Gould ever wrote over the following three years while he wandered the deserts of Turkmenistan and worked for an environmental consultancy in Azerbaijan. Deciding that evolution was cooler than oil, Greger studied at Oxford and the University of Colorado before receiving his PhD in Zoology in 2006. He then spent two years in Uppsala, Sweden on an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship before starting a job in the department of archaeology at Durham University. Greger then moved to Oxford University to become the Director of the Palaeogenomics & Bio-Archaeology Research Network where he is continuing his focus on the use of ancient DNA to study the pattern and process of domestication. He rarely wonders what his salary would be had he stuck to oil.

Professor of Botany, Kunming Institute of Botany Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Dr. De-Zhu Li is a professor of botany at Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He served as KIB’s deputy director (1997-2005), director (2005-2014), and president of CAS Kunming Branch (2014-2019) and vice president of Botanical Society of China (2008-2018). He was awarded an OBE for his contributions to biodiversity conservation by the UK in 2010. He is now head of CAS’ Germplasm Bank of Wild Species (2007-), member of scientific advisory committee for International Barcode of Life initiative (2010-) and council member of International Association of Plant Taxonomy (2017-). Dr. Li has authored 390 papers in academic journals including Nature Plants, PNAS, Trends in Plant Science, Systematic Biology, Molecular Plant, and Ecology Letters, as well as 22 monographs and books, including the bamboo account of the Flora of China, and A Dictionary of the Families and Genera of Chinese Vascular Plants.

Professor, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

The research topics of Meng-Hua Li consist of population and conservation genomics of domestic sheep and their wild ancestors. He is interested in characterizing the climate-induced impact on the genome of different native sheep breeds which have adapted to a diverse range of climates or environments. He also is interested in characterizing the genomic diversity of domestic and wild sheep (e.g., Asian Mouflon, Argali, Urial, and so on) using different types of markers such as whole-genome SNP, mtDNA, and Y-chromosomal markers. Currently, he is identifying the genetic variants associated with various phenotypic traits in sheep using whole-genome sequences at a high-depth.

Dr. Muranaka obtained his Ph.D. in Agriculture from Kyoto University 1993. After he finished a master’s course at the Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University in 1985 and entered Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd. and conducted research on plant biotechnology. He left Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd. in 2001 and joined RIKEN Plant Science Center as a Team Leader. In 2007, he moved to Yokohama City University as a full professor, then in 2010, moved to Osaka University. He also has a position in RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Center, Japan as a Senior Visiting Scientist. His recent research projects especially focus on phytochemical genomics and application of genome editing for metabolic engineering and crop improvement. He has been an Editorial Board of Plant and Cell Physiology. From 2016 to 2018, he was assigned as a President of Japanese Society for Plant Cell and Molecular Biology. He has been on the board of The Japanese Society for Genome Editing since 2016. He received an Academic Award from Japanese Society for Plant Cell and Molecular Biology in 2019.

Scientific Group Leader (PI) and Professor, Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben & Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany

After studying Biology (Kaiserslautern), graduating in Genetics (Hohenheim) and doing postdoc research (Zurich), Nils Stein joined the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, in 2001 to work on cereal genomics. Since then, his research focused on structural and comparative genome analysis of the small grain cereals barley, wheat and rye – with a leading role in genome sequencing of all three species. This work has recently been extended into pan-genome analysis of barley and wheat with the intention of unlocking the genomic diversity of the vast genetic resources available for the small grains hosted in ex situ gene banks. Since September 2018 Nils is professor of Plant Genetic Resources, Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany, holding a dual appointment with IPK Gatersleben.

Professor in Bioinformatics and Genome Biology, Ghent University - VIB, Belgium

Yves Van de Peer (YVdP) obtained his PhD in 1996 at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Konstanz, Germany, he was hired at Ghent University (BE) as an Associate Professor in 2001, and promoted to Full Professor in 2008. YVdP’s research group is considered a genome analysis powerhouse specialized in the study of the structure and evolution of (plant) genomes. Because of their unique expertise and experience in gene prediction, genome annotation, and genome analysis, his research group has been, and still is, involved in many international genome projects. YVdP is particularly interested in the study of gene and genome duplications as well as in the evolution of novel gene functions after duplication. YVdP published more than 450 papers, many of which in high-profile journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Reviews Genetics, Science, PNAS, Genome Research, and The Plant Cell. YVdP has an H-index > 100 and his work has been cited more than 60,000 times. For many consecutive years, YVdP has been a Highly Cited Researcher (Web of Science; https://hcr.clarivate.com). In 2013, YVdP received a highly prestigious ERC Advanced Grant entitled “DOUBLE-UP: The evolutionary significance of genome duplications for natural and artificial organism populations”, and in 2018 another one entitled “DOUBLE-TROUBLE: Replaying the ‘genome duplication’ tape of life: the adaptive potential of polyploidy in a stressful or changing environment”. YVdP is Organizer and Chair of the bi-annual international Current Opinion Conference on Plant Genome Evolution. This meeting was held in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. YVdP is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB; since 2012) and serves on the Editorial Boards of five international journals (The Plant Journal, PeerJ, Genome Biology and Evolution, Current Plant Biology, Frontiers in Genetics).

Professor, Northwestern Polytechnical University, USA

Prof. Wen Wang has been studying evolutionary genomics of natural and domestic species, with focus on origin and evolution of genetic novelties in genomes. He is now a professor of Center for Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and is also an adjunct professor of Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has led the international Ruminant Genome Project, and has achieved significant progresses recently.