Plenary Speaker Bios

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, China Agricultural University, China

The research topics of Meng-Hua Li consist of population and conservation genomics of small ruminants (e.g., sheep and goat) and their wild ancestors. He is interested in characterizing the climate-induced impact on the genomes of different native breeds which have adapted to a diverse range of climates or environments at whole-genome and single cell levels. He also is interested in characterizing the genomic diversity of domestic and wild sheep or goat 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 and goat using whole-genome and single cell transcriptomic sequences.

Associate Professor in Sorghum Genomics, The University of Queensland, Australia

Associate Professor Mace obtained her PhD in 1998 from The University of Birmingham, before holding three post-doctoral fellowships (ILRI, ICRISAT, and The University of Queensland) focused on the application of genomics technologies to support plant breeding programs and germplasm collections. She then took up a research scientist position for the Queensland government in the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, leading molecular breeding activities in both sorghum and barley. She now holds a joint position with The University of Queensland, and works on a range of plant genomics research projects, spanning 3 themes:

1. Developing innovative genomics resources to support crop improvement

2. Dissecting the genetic and physiological basis of key traits of importance in crop improvement.

3. Improving the capacity of crop improvement programs in the developing world:

Her research outputs are characterised by their reach-through to both fundamental to applied outcomes and through integration with islands of knowledge generated by other disciplines to create synergies in crop research.

Programme Leader, Designing Future Wheat, John Innes Centre, UK

Graham’s research provides an understanding of the control of pairing and crossover between related chromosomes in wheat and enables the incorporation of genes from wild relatives into the wheat genome to provide beneficial traits for yield and resilience.

Graham is also working to understand the genes involved in the temperature sensitivity of meiosis which will be important for growing wheat in a warming environment.

Wheat breeding
Genetic recombination
(crossover) in wheat The effect of temperature on meiosis

Inducing chromosomes derived from different wheat varieties to recombine is fundamental to plant breeding. Fertility of polyploid species, such as wheat and many flowering plants, depends on pairing and recombination at meiosis occurring only between true homologous chromosomes.

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.