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MEDIA AREA Registration form Programme highlights About the speakers Press kit Press release Daily reports < Back to the media area		4th EPSO CONFERENCE 2008 “Plants for Life” 22-26 June 2008, Toulon (Côte d'Azur), France  About the speakers Sunday 22 June Karin Metzlaff has been executive director of the European Plant Science Organisation since its creation in 2000. She works with the EPSO members and other partners to promote plant research in the European science policy agenda by providing advice and recommendations to politicians at European and national level. Karin coordinates the European Technology Platform “Plants for the Future” and represents EPSO in the Initiative for Science in Europe, ISE. Before that Karin was two years project manager of twelve EU-funded plant research projects and she has eight years postdoctoral experience in molecular biology, plant genetics and developmental biology in the UK and Germany. Hélène Lucas is head of the Genetics and Plant Breeding Division of France’s National Institute for Agricultural research (INRA) comprising more than 1000 people. She elaborates, implements and supervises INRA’s scientific strategy related to plant breeding, genetics and genomics. Her research focuses on epigenetics regulation and its influence on plants and their environment. André Le Bivic is Deputy Scientific Director of the Department of Life Sciences at the French National Research Institute (CNRS). He is also group leader of the Morphogenesis and Cell Compartimentation group at the Developmental Biology Institute of Marseilles (IBDML), an institute overseen by the CNRS and the University of the Mediterranean. François Houllier is Scientific Director for Plants and Plant Products at the French National Institute for Agricultural research (INRA). From 2001-2004, he was head of the Department for Forests and Natural Environment at INRA. Richard B. Flavell is currently Chief Scientific Officer of Ceres, a California-based plant genomics company he joined in 1998. From 1987 to 1998, he was the Director of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, a premier plant and microbial research institute. He has published over 200 scientific articles, lectured widely and contributed significantly to the development of modern biotechnology in agriculture. His research group in the United Kingdom was among the very first worldwide to successfully clone plant DNA, isolate and sequence plant genes, and produce transgenic plants. Richard B. Flavell is an expert in cereal plant genomics, having produced the first molecular maps of plant chromosomes to reveal the constituent sequences. He has been a leader in European plant biotechnology, initiating and guiding a pan-European organisation to manage large EU plant biotechnology research programmes more effectively. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of California at Los Angeles. Timothy Hall worked as a research scientist in the UK before joining the Commission services in 1983, becoming Head of Unit for S&T Cooperation with Developing Countries in 1994. He has also headed units in the Quality of Life Directorate under FP5 and in the Health Directorate under FP6. His current position (since October 2006) is Head of Unit for Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries and Aquaculture with primary responsibilities for overseeing the management of projects in these areas supported under FP6, and implementing the Activity "Sustainable production and management of biological resources from land, forest and aquatic environments" in the FP7 Theme "Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, and Biotechnology". Since 1 September 2007, he also holds the position of Acting Director for Biotechnologies, Agriculture and Food. Charalambos (Babis) Savakis is Senior Advisor to the Chairman of the European Research Council (ERC) and Professor of Molecular Biology and Molecular Genetics at the Medical School of the University of Crete and Research Scientist at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB-FoRTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece. His research focuses on transgenesis and functional genomic analysis in insects and mammals using transposable elements. He has been actively involved in open access policy issues as a member of the International Advisory Committee for Nucleotide Sequence Databases. Wilhelm Gruissem is president of the European Plant Science Organisation (EPSO). He is professor of Plant Biotechnology in the Institute of Plant Sciences at the ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and co-director of the Functional Genomics Centre Zurich. From 2004 to 2006 he was Chair of the Zurich-Basel Plant Science Centre. From 1983 to 2000, he was professor of plant biology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on mechanisms involved in plant growth control. He also directs a biotechnology program on trait improvement in cassava, rice and wheat. Together with colleagues in China he is currently directing the Shanghai Centre for Cassava Biotechnology in China. Mike Gale is member of the CGIAR Science Council (NL), Emeritus Fellow of the John Innes Foundation (UK) and Professorial Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia (UK). He is an expert in the genetics of cereal crops and his research group at the John Innes Centre has unravelled the genetics of the Green Revolution semi-dwarfing genes and the genetic control of pre-harvest sprouting resistance in wheat. He is the author of more than 200 articles in scientific journals. Monday 23 June Catherine Feuillet is research director and leader of the group "Structure, function and evolution of the wheat genomes" at the INRA, Clermont-Ferrand (France). She was educated as a geneticist and molecular biologist and has worked for 10 years in Switzerland on the genomics of disease resistance in wheat and barley. She is one of the co-chairs of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium (IWGSC), the International Triticeae Mapping Initiative (ITMI), and the European Triticeae Genomics Initiative (ETGI). Stephen Hopper is a Western Australian botanist, specialized in conservation biology and vascular plants. He has been Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK), since 2006. Hopper has a broad experience in plant science and plant conservation and is the author of more than 200 publications, including eight books. He is a passionate conservation biologist and has been engaged in practical plant conservation for almost 30 years. He was previously Foundation Professor of Plant Conservation Biology at the University of Western Australia, and former Director of Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Perth (Australia). Ulrich Schurr is director of the Institute Phytosphere at the Research Centre Jülich and professor of botany at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. His research focuses on the dynamics of growth, photosynthesis and transport as well as their interaction with the spatially and temporally heterogeneous environment of plants. In his research he uses non invasive technologies like digital image sequence analysis, magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography to quantify dynamic of plant processes and of controlling environmental parameters. In addition to detailed mechanistic analysis of plant processes in space and time by these methods hitherto mainly used in medical non-invasive diagnostics his institute does also develop and apply novel plant phenotyping and screening systems. Robert Watson has been the Chief Scientific Adviser for the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) since September 2007. He’s also Director of the Secretariat of the IAASTD, the international research programme that, for the last three years, has been assessing the sustainability of agriculture world-wide, taking into account population growth, climate change and loss of biodiversity. Watson has a successful career in science and international policy and has held distinguished positions at the World Bank, Nasa, the White House and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Tuesday 24 June Ottoline Leyser is professor of Plant Developmental Genetics at the Department of Biology, University of York (UK). She has made unique and central contributions to understanding of plant development. Her research focuses on the role of plant hormones, such as auxin, in plant growth. She identified the endogenous auxin receptor and has elucidated downstream pathways of hormone action, using this knowledge to characterise the control of shoot architecture. Mark Stitt directs the Department of Metabolic Networks at the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm, Germany. The research groups within this department study a wide set of physiological processes involved in photosynthetic carbon metabolism, growth, and storage. Tobacco, potato, and Arabidopsis thaliana are the main plants used in these investigations. Wednesday 25 June Jonathan Jones is a leading plant geneticist and authority on plant disease resistance. He is head of the charitably-funded Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre in Norwich. Jonathan Jones gained his PhD at Cambridge in Plant Breeding, and his postdoctoral at Harvard in symbiotic nitrogen fixation. He worked at a startup agbiotech company called AGS in the US from 1983-1988 and has been at the Sainsbury Lab since 1988. Peter Langridge is professor of plant science at the University of Adelaide and chief executive officer of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG). His research has focused on development and application of molecular biology to crop improvement. Lothar Willmitzer is the Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology (Golm, Germany) and head of the Department Molecular Physiology. The research groups within his department focus on the study of carbohydrate, amino acid and lipid metabolism in plants. Kaisa Poutanen has been research professor in food technology at VTT Biotechnology (Finland) since 1989, and part-time director of the Food and Health Research Centre in University of Kuopio since 2000. She is co-author of more than 200 scientific articles and hundreds of communications in enzyme technology, cereal and polysaccharide technology, and on nutritional properties of foods. Prof Poutanen is currently the coordinator of the EU-funded HEALTHGRAIN project that aims to improve wellbeing and reduce the prevalence of the insulin-resistance syndrome in the European population by increasing the intake of protective whole-grain components. Thursday 26 June Birgitte K. Ahring is currently professor at the Technical University of Denmark. She is an internationally recognized microbiologist for her studies on the use of anaerobic bacteria — bacteria that exists in an oxygen-free environment — to biodegrade waste. She also is founder and Chief Executive Officer of BioGasol, an engineering and technology company that designs and develops technologies for second generation bioethanol production. In August 2008 she will join Washington State University (USA) as the director of the Center for Bioproducts and Bioenergy where she will be responsible for setting up leading research activities in the field of bioenergy. Yuri Gleba is CEO of Icon Genetics, a plant biotech company he co-found in 1999. He has over 30 years of research and management experience in plant genetics and biotechnology and is member of several prestigious international scientific academies. In 1988, he founded the International Institute of Cell Biology, Kiev, Ukraine, and is still serving as its Director. Dr. Gleba’s pioneering research in plant cell biology, genetics and physiology were published in more than 200 research papers, books and over 20 patents.