Staff profile

Ian completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide in 1984 and took a position as a lecturer in Plant Biochemistry in the Botany Department. In 1989 he was awarded a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship which took him to the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK where he worked on starch metabolism. On returning to CSIRO he worked with Dr Simon Robinson on the genetic control of browning reactions in horticultural crops. In 1992, he moved into a team working on the development of strategies for resistance of crop species against geminiviruses. In 1997, he formed a molecular plant pathology group focused on molecular strategies to improve the resistance of grapevines to fungal and oomycete pathogens with particular emphasis on powdery mildew, downy mildew and botrytis bunch rot. His group were the first in the world to develop mildew-resistant transgenic winegrapes by transferring powdery mildew and downy mildew resistance genes from a wild North American grape species into existing premium winegrape cultivars.