University of Adelaide - 8:45 AM Wednesday

“Plant Cell Walls: From the Plant to Human Health and
Renewable Biofuels”

Geoff Fincher is the Professor of Plant Science at the University of Adelaide and the Director of the newly established Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls. The ARC Centre of Excellence will receive $31 million in cash funding from 2011-2017. The CoE has additional nodes at the University of Melbourne and the University of Queensland, together with several overseas partner organizations. Geoff is also the leader of a new CSIRO Food Futures Flagship Cluster on ‘High Fibre Grain’, which will receive more than $3.5 million from 2010-2013 for work on the role of wall polysaccharides in human health and nutrition.

Until recently Geoff was Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, which has a core budget of approximately $8 million per annum. He was involved, with other colleagues, in setting up the ACPFG in 2003 and he was chair of the Executive Management Group from 2003-2010. He has also developed collaborative projects between the ACPFG and the DuPont-Pioneer company, and with ABB Grain Ltd.

From 2007-2010, Geoff and Mark Tester, together with colleagues at the ANU and the CSIRO Division of Plant Industry, secured more than $52 million in funding to establish the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility. As part of this Facility an automated, high throughput phenotyping glasshouse has been constructed on the Waite Campus of the University of Adelaide. This component of the APPF is known as the ‘Plant Accelerator’.

Geoff was the Director of the Waite Campus of the University of Adelaide from 2003-2010 and has been the Director of a GRDC-funded program on the functional genomics of growth and end-use quality in cereals for seven years. He serves as an editor for the Journal of Cereal Science and is also a long-serving member of the editorial board of Planta. He chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee of Biomime, the Swedish centre for wood functional genomics.

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