Dr. Geitmann’s research focuses on the cellular processes underlying plant reproduction and development. She holds the Canada Research Chair in Biomechanics of Plant Development and leads an interdisciplinary team of biologists and engineers. Dr. Geitmann's research combines cell biology with micromanipulation methodology and mathematical concepts to reveal novel aspects of plant functioning. Dr. Geitmann has served as President of the Microscopical Society of Canada, the Canadian Society of Plant Biologists, the International Association of Plant Reproduction Research, and she serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals including Cell, Plant Physiology, and Journal of Experimental Botany. She is also the Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, McGill University.

Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair in Plant Genomics

Professor, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

Dr. C. Robin Buell is the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar Chair in Crop Genomics in the Department of Crop & Soil Sciences at the University of Georgia. Prior to joining UGA, she was a University Distinguished Faculty and MSU Foundation Professor of Plant Biology at Michigan State University (2007-2021), an Associate Investigator at The Institute for Genomic Research (1999-2007), and an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University (1997-1998). While at Michigan State University, she served as Director of the Plant Resilience Institute (2018-2021)

Her research program focuses on the genome biology of plants including comparative genomics, bioinformatics, and computational biology. She has worked on the genomes of Arabidopsis, rice, potato, maize, switchgrass, sweetpotato, mints, and medicinal plants. She has done pioneering work on potato genomics and genetics, facilitating development of genome sequences, analysis of genetic diversity, identification of genes involved in domestication, and development of potato dihaploids. With expertise in bioinformatics, one component of Dr. Buell’s research is provision of databases and web-based data-mining tools for the greater scientific community. Dr. Buell maintains the Rice Genome Annotation Project, which receives over 2 million page visits a year. Dr. Buell earned her BSc from the University of Maryland, her MSc from Washington State University, and her PhD from Utah State University. Dr. Buell has an active research group composed of postdoctoral research fellows, research assistants, graduate students, undergraduate students and collaborates with scientists across the United States and throughout the world. She has served as an editor at Plant Physiology, the Plant Genome, Crop Science, Frontiers in Plant Genetics and Genomics, and Plant Cell. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement for Science and the American Society of Plant Biologists. In 2022, she was the recipient of the The McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies from the Maize Genetics Cooperation Advocacy Committee. Buell has published more than 270 papers and secured more than $76M in competitive research funding including PI of a recently awarded $15.8M grant from the U.S. Department of Energy focused on synthetic biology of poplar. She serves as an advisor to several research consortia including the Salk Institute’s Harnessing the Plant Initiative.

Jonathan Jones (JJ) investigates plant immunity to disease. His team isolated and characterized many resistance (R) genes that encode plant immune receptors and revealed key insights into immune receptor mechanisms. He pioneered genomics methods to accelerate R gene cloning and the analysis of plant immune receptor diversity and evolution and is a strong advocate for using immune receptor genes from wild relatives to replace crop protection agrochemicals with genetics.

JJ graduated in Botany from Cambridge University, UK (1976), and a PhD jointly between Cambridge Genetics Department and the Plant Breeding Institute in Trumpington (1980). After a postdoc with Fred Ausubel at Harvard on symbiotic nitrogen fixation (1981-2), he worked at start-up agbiotech company AGS in Oakland, CA, optimizing transgene expression and studying the behavior of maize transposons in tobacco. Since 1988, JJ has worked at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich UK, serving as Head of Laboratory 1994-7 and 2003-2009. He was elected member of EMBO in 1998, Fellow of Royal Society in 2003 and International Member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015. He received this year’s outstanding achievement award from the ISMPMI (https://www.ismpmi.org/members/Awards/Pages/2023-Awardees.aspx) .

Edwin van der Vossen was born and brought up in Africa until the age of 15. Following his dream to contribute to food security, he obtained an MSc degree in Plant Breeding at Wageningen University in 1991, and a PhD in Plant Virology at Leiden University in 1996. For the next twelve years he pursued an academic career at Wageningen University, where he was a group leader within the Department of Plant Breeding, focusing on Molecular Resistance Breeding in potato. In 2008 he switched to industry and worked as VP Crop Innovation at the plant biotech company KeyGene, operating at the interface between DNA technology and breeding. In 2020 he became R&D Director at the hybrid potato breeding company Solynta, located in Wageningen, where, together with his colleagues, he is unlocking the true potential of potato.

Dr. Sanwen Huang studied at China Agricultural University and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is now a professor at the Agricultural Genomics Institute in Shenzhen, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the President of the Chinese Academy of Tropical Agricultural Sciences. He serves as the Vice President of the Chinese Society for Plant Biology and a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of Cell. He won the National Natural Science Award of China and the Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress of the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation. He works in the interdisciplinary field of genomics, molecular biology, and plant breeding, using potato and vegetable crops as research subjects. He illustrated the genomic history of the domestication of cucumber and tomato, and he dissected the genetic basis of cucumber bitterness and tomato flavor, which helps develop better-tasting vegetable cultivars. Using genome design methodology, he is reinventing potato from a clonally propagated tetraploid crop into a seed-propagated diploid crop, which will transform potato breeding from a slow, non-accumulative mode to a fast-iterative one.

Dr. Yuling Bai, professor of Plant Breeding at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. Since 2007 she has been leading the research group of “Breeding for Resistance”, with the aim to develop breeding strategies for durable resistance in different crops. The research focuses on the understanding of genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying disease resistances in vegetable crops against pathogens. Various genetic and genomics approaches are exploited to discover novel plant resistance (R) and susceptibility (S) genes and to study their interaction with the corresponding pathogens. The strong point in her research is its translational feature: overarching strategically the fundamental research to applied breeding practices. Her research has resulted in many publication in scientific Journals with high impact factors and also led to great impact in breeding practice by developing novel breeding strategies, tools and prebreeding plant materials. She is associate/senior editor for several scientific Journals and Chairperson of the Vegetable Section of EUCAPIA (European Association for Research on Plant Breeding).

Robert Last is University Distinguished Professor and Barnett Rosenberg Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University, where he also serves as Program Director of the Plants for Health and Sustainability T32 NIH Graduate Training Program. He is a past President of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and American Society of Plant Biologists. From 2003-2004 Last was a Program Officer at the US National Science Foundation, from 1998-2002 he served as a Science Director at Cereon Genomics in Cambridge MA, and from 1989-1998 he rose through the ranks to Professor at Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University. Prior to that he was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, a PhD student at Carnegie-Mellon and an undergraduate at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Leonie Moyle is a Professor of Biology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her PhD in Biology from Duke University, and did postdoctoral research at the University of California, Davis. Her research examines the genetics and ecology of speciation and adaptation, focusing on Solanaceous groups including Solanum. Current areas of interest include: genomics of rapid species radiations; ecological genetics of climate adaptation; mechanisms of reproductive evolution; and, the frequency and adaptive consequences of introgressive hybridization. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and has served as a past Vice President of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), and on the editorial boards of Evolution, Genetics, PLOS Biology, and New Phytologist.

Professor of Biology, Stanford Friends University Fellow in Undergraduate Education,
Senior Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences in the School of Humanities and Sciences

Mary Beth Mudgett studies plant-microbe interactions focusing on how bacterial pathogens
manipulate plant defenses resulting in disease. Currently there are four themes in the lab,
namely: pathogen effector biology, long-distance chemical signaling in plants, biosynthesis and
function of unusual plant lipids, and technology development to visualize protein complex
dynamics and activities in vivo.
Mary Beth received her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Ithaca College and her
doctorate in Biochemistry from the University of California in Los Angeles in Steven G. Clarke’s
laboratory. She performed postdoctoral research with Brian Staskawicz at the University of
California in Berkeley before becoming a faculty member in the Department of Biology at
Stanford University in 2002. As President of the International Society for Plant-Microbe
Interactions, Mary Beth launched a series of virtual symposia and platforms to enable
networking on a global scale, while creating an inclusive environment to hear from the society’s
diverse stakeholders. At Stanford, Mary Beth is recognized for excellence in and dedication to
teaching and mentorship at the undergraduate and graduate levels. As Senior Associate Dean
for the Natural Sciences, Mary Beth is enriching STEM curriculum and teaching, as well as
research opportunities within the natural sciences to enhance the student experience and
champion the scholarship of the faculty.

Dr. Julien Pirrello is associate professor at National Institute of Polytechnic of Toulouse. His group focuses on the different transition phase of the fruit development and fruit ripening, using tomato as model. Recently, substantial advances have been made by his group to understand the mechanism underlying the locule gel formation. His team made a substantial contribution to unravelling the role of ethylene in tomato fruit development and ripening through functional characterization of ERF genes. Recently his team demonstrated that transition to ripening in tomato requires hormone-controlled genetic reprogramming initiated in gel tissue and identified transcription factors families specifically regulated at the Mature Green stage in the gel but not in the pericarp, thereby providing potential targets toward deciphering the initial factors and events that trigger the transition to ripening. Since 2023 he is co-editor in chief of Vegetable Research Journal.

Ivo Rieu is Professor of Crop Biotechnology and Chair of the Department of Plant and Animal Physiology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Since 2010, he leads a research line on plant stress responses, with a focus on reproductive heat tolerance. Exposure of plants to high temperature is detrimental for fertility, causing them to produce fewer seeds and fruits. Using a combination of physiological, molecular and genetic analyses, he tries to understand which reproductive processes are most sensitive to high temperature and which traits and responses are adaptive. By studying model plants and crop species, and experimenting in controlled and field environments, his research generates fundamental as well as applicable knowledge. Financial support for his research comes from a variety of science and technology funding agencies and plant breeding companies.

Laura Shannon is an evolutionary geneticist by training (at the University of Wisconsin, Cornell University, then back to the University of Wisconsin). In 2017 she started applying those skills to potato breeding as faculty at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Horticultural Science. The Shannon Lab works to elucidate potato diversity, evolution, and domestication, in order to inform the development and application of methods to speed the potato breeding process, all in service of developing new potato varieties with increased biotic and abiotic stress resistance for Minnesota growers.

David Weiss is a professor at the Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics, the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Environment, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

David received his PhD in plant physiology from the Hebrew University (1990). He undertook postdoctoral research at the Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands (1990-1993). In 1993 he joined the Institute of Plant Sciences and Genetics. His research is focused on gibberellin (GA) biosynthesis, signaling and responses, mainly in tomato. He also studies the role of GA and its antagonist hormone ABA in the regulation of plant response and adaptation to drought.