Professor Richard Oliver Editor & Author

Professor Richard Oliver has recently retired from his position as John Curtin Distinguished Professor in the Centre for Crop Disease Management at Curtin University, Australia. Amongst other honours, Professor Oliver is an Honorary Fellow of the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), Honorary Professor at Nottingham Universities and was previously a Fellow at Rothamsted Research in the UK and a Visiting Professor at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He is also a past President of the British Society for Plant Pathology. Prof Kim Hammond-Kosack is a molecular plant pathologist and geneticist who’s current research focuses on fungal pathogens which infect hexaploid wheat. Since 1998, her group has investigated the Fusarium-wheat interaction, first in industry (1998-2002) and then at Rothamsted Research (since 2002). She discovered the symptomless phase of floral infection which is crucial for disease formation. Her group has played a major role in completing the full assembly and annotation of the reference genomes for F. graminearum, F. culmorum and F. venenatum genomes. She has published over 160 peer reviewed publications, 7 patents and is presently an associate editor at Plant Physiology. Since 2017, she has been the deputy head of the Department of Biointeractions and Crop Protection at Rothamsted Research. Dr Stephen B. Goodwin is a Research Plant Pathologist with the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with a current focus on Septoria tritici blotch of wheat plus tar spot of maize. Dr. Marc-Henri Lebrun is a research director at the French CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research) and currently head of the EGIP team at BIOGER INRAE-AgroParisTech Paris-Saclay University Institute dedicated to the study of fungal plant pathogens in Thiverval-Grignon, France. He is also President of the foundation for European Conferences on Fungal Genetics. He has served in editorial board of Fungal Genetic and Biology for 10 years, and he is currently Editor for Frontiers in Microbiology. He has supervised 12 Ph’D, and he has been director of UMR BIOGER (100 scientists/technicians/students) for 10 years (2005-2014). Dr Francisco Lopez-Ruiz leads the Fungicide Resistance Group at the Centre for Crop and Disease Management (CCDM). Based in the School of Molecular and Life Sciences at Curtin University, Australia, the Fungicide Resistance Group has made major contributions towards the management of fungicide resistance in several key cereal pathogens. Dr Lopez-Ruiz has published widely on the mechanisms of fungicide resistance and its detection. Dr. Franckowiak has studied barley breeding and genetics for over 40 years with research programs at North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND, USA; Department of Agriculture and Fisheries at the Hermitage Research Facility, Warwick, Queensland, Australia; and the University of Minnesota. In corporation with Dr. Udda Lundqvist, Dr. Franckowiak prepared many new and revised Barley Genetic Stock (BGS) descriptions for the Barley Genetics Newsletter (BGN). Professor Frank Ordon is President of the Julius Kühn-Institute (JKI), the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants in Germany. He is Honorary Professor for Molecular Resistance Breeding at the Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Editor-in-Chief of Plant Breeding, a member of the editorial board of several other journals and Chair of the Wheat Initiative Research Committee. He has published widely on molecular markers and improving resistance to biotic and abiotic stress especially in cereals. Dr. Christina Cowger is a small grains pathologist with the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and a professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her research focuses on the epidemiology and sustainable management of diseases of wheat and barley, especially powdery mildew, Fusarium head blight, Septoria nodorum blotch (SNB), and barley yellow dwarf virus. Dr. Cowger has contributed to the identification of numerous sources of resistance to cereal diseases, as well as illuminating the etiology of those diseases and the population dynamics of the pathogens. She coordinates the USDA SNB screening nursery and is active in the US Wheat & Barley Scab Initiative.