Knowledge Based Bio-Economy towards 2020

 

Mr. GRUISSEM WILHELM

President - European Plant Science Organization

 

Biography

Prof. Wilhelm Gruissem has been Professor of Plant Biotechnology in the Department of Biology at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) since 2000. He was elected President of the European Plant Science Organization (EPSO) in 2006.

 

After obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Bonn in 1979 he was appointed as professor of plant biology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983.

 

He was Chair of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley from 1993 to 1998, and from 1998 to 2000 he was Director of a collaborative research program between the Department and Novartis.

 

Since 2001 he is Co-Director of the Functional Genomics Center Zurich. In addition to his research on systems approaches to understand pathways and molecules involved in plant growth control, he directs a biotechnology program on trait improvement in cassava, rice and wheat.

 

He is elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and Editor in Chief of Plant Molecular Biology and on the editorial boards of several journals. He published the acclaimed book ‘Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Plants’.

He has received several prestigious awards, including a price from the Eiselen Foundation in Germany for his trait improvement work in cassava. In 2007 he was elected lifetime foreign member of the American Society of Plant Biologists.

 

Programme

Chair, Part III Working together to address the NEEDS - Session I: feedstocks for the KBBE