Plant Genetic Resources for the 21st Century

Kioumars Ghamkhar, PhD, is Director of New Zealand's National Forage Genebank, Margot Forde Forage Germplasm Centre and leads plant phenomics research at New Zealand Crown Research Institute, AgResearch. He has over 20 years of experience in the conservation, classification, characterization, and use of plant genetic resources. Dr. Ghamkhar co-chairs the Phenomics Working Group at the DivSeek International Network and the Seed and Germplasm Phenotyping Working Group at the International Plant Phenotyping Network. He is an associate editor with Frontiers in Plant Science.

Warren M. Williams, PhD, is Emeritus Scientist of the AgResearch Grasslands Research Centre, Palmerston North, New Zealand, and former Professorial Fellow in Plant Breeding at Massey University, Palmerston North. He was the breeder or co-breeder of eight commercially successful forage cultivars and contributed as a prebreeder for several more. He was the Curator of the Margot Forde Germplasm Centre, the New Zealand genebank for forage species. He carried out plant breeding research using interspecific hybridization in forage species and participated in seed collecting expeditions in Europe and North America. He has authored over 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers and was a contributor and co-editor of the 1987 CABI book White Clover, with MJ Baker.

Anthony Hugh Dean Brown, PhD, was until recently Honorary Research Fellow of Bioversity International, Rome, Italy, and Technical Advisor on their global project developing the scientific basis of in situ conservation on-farm. He retired in 2006 as a Chief Research Scientist in the Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research, CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra, Australia, but continued until 2015 there as Honorary Research Fellow in the Australian National Herbarium, researching the evolution and conservation biology of indigenous species related to crops. He has authored singly or jointly over 200 research papers and reviews, and monographs (with D. I. Jarvis, T. Hodgkin, J. Tuxhill, I.L. Noriega, M. Smale and B. Sthapit, Crop Genetic Diversity in the Field and on the Farm). He has participated in plant collecting missions for wild relatives of crops, two for wild barley (Israel, Iran) and six for wild Glycine and Gossypium in many regions of Australia. He was curator of the Australian Plant Genetics Resources Centre for Indigenous wild relatives of crops.