Journées du Centre SÈVE 2026

Dr. Yang Qu is a plant biochemist and an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of New Brunswick, where he leads a research program on plant specialized metabolism and metabolic engineering. He received his B.Sc. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Calgary before joining UNB as a faculty member. Dr. Qu's research seeks to understand how plants produce complex medicinal natural products and to harness these pathways for sustainable biomanufacturing. His laboratory has made pioneering contributions to the elucidation and engineering of monoterpenoid indole alkaloid (MIA) biosynthesis, including pathways leading to the anticancer drug vinblastine and other pharmaceutically important alkaloids. Dr. Qu's research spans  enzyme pathway elucidation, comparative genomics, and synthetic biology, with the long-term goal of transforming our understanding of plant specialized metabolism while developing scalable platforms for the sustainable production of pharmaceuticals. His work has been published in leading journals, including Science, PNAS, and Nature Communications.

Dr. Awais Khan is a Professor of Plant Genetics in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University. His research program focuses on the genetic characterization and utilization of disease resistance in apples to develop cultivars with improved resistance to bacterial and fungal diseases. He has PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland (ETH) on fire blight of apples, and an MSc from the University of Gottingen, Germany. He also has research experience in applied genetics and breeding at the University of York, UK, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Prior to joining Cornell, Dr. Khan led a global research program as a senior scientist at the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru, a CGIAR center, to develop genomic tools to breed potatoes and sweetpotatoes with stress tolerance for Central and South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, a critical need for adapting crops to thrive under climate change.

 Dr. Awais Khan has published extensively on plant genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics and has given invited talks at international conferences globally. A distinctive feature of his career is his breadth of international experience, spanning five continents and six crops, and his work with breeders, geneticists, students, and farmers in both global south and global north to advance sustainable agriculture.

 View full list of Dr. Khan's publications on Google Scholar