Dr Ben Trevaskis

Ben is Research Director for the Systems Program in the CSIRO Agriculture and Food business unit. The purpose of the Systems program is to improve productivity, profitability and sustainability of Australian Agriculture through research and innovation.

This includes:

• Integrated farming systems management spanning crops and livestock.

• Farmer-facing digital technologies to improve farm productivity, resilience and natural resource management.

• Advance on-farm decision-making for gains in production and quality of food and fibre.

• Innovations in pest and weed management.

• Diversification of farming systems and integration of sustainable practices for production resilience.

The Systems program has a national footprint with people located in most states and territories.

Prior to his current role Ben completed a PhD through the Australian National University, based at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra. He then travelled to Germany for three years for a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Potsdam. He has been with CSIRO since returning to Australia in 2002.

From 2002 to 2015 Ben focussed on researching the genetic pathways that control the seasonal flowering-behaviours of crops. The main focus of this research was genes that control flowering of wheat, particularly the vernalization response, whereby the prolonged cold of winter triggers spring flowering. This topic is important to agriculture because understanding how genetic variation influences flowering can help plant breeders adapt future crop varieties to target growing conditions.

From 2015 to 2022, Ben was a Group Leader who led teams of researchers working on developing new approaches to accelerate crop improvement, including genomics, phenomics and computational biology. Staff from the group play a lead role in implementing new digital solutions to applied crop biology research in CSIRO and are actively engaged in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Future Science Platform.

Ben is a creative leader focussed on building a culture that helps people be the best that they can be.