BSPP Plant Health Club ‘Networking at Conferences’

BSPP Plant Health Club ‘Preparing for PPATH2024’

A series of Plant Health Club sessions – helping plant pathologists get the most out of the annual BSPP meeting and other conferences.

‘Networking at Conferences’

This is session 3 in the ‘Preparing for PPATH2024’ series.

Presented by,

Rob Jackson, University of Birmingham and Gail Preston, University of Oxford.

Professor Rob Jackson did an HND and Bachelor of Science in Applied Biological Sciences at Bristol Polytechnic/the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol. He stayed on to do his PhD studying the role plasmids in the virulence of the plant pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas syringae pv. phaseolicola and this led to his first postdoctoral post. He then did a postdoctoral post at the University of Oxford studing beneficial bacteria followed by a short fellowship at the University of Auckland, another short term post at UWE, and a two year postdoctoral post at the University of Bath. He took up a lectureship at the University of Reading, becoming an Associate Professor there in 2013. He was promoted to Professor of Molecular Microbiology in 2016 and became the Head of School of Biological Sciences from 2017-2020. In 2020, he took up the post of Director of the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR) and BIFoR Chair in Tree Pathology at the University of Birmingham. He also took on the role as Deputy Head of School of Biosciences. He holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Reading and Adjunct Professorship at the University of Akureyri, Iceland.

Professor Gail Preston is a Lecturer in Plant-Microbe Interactions, Director of the BBSRC-funded Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Oxford and Deputy Director of the University of Oxford’s Doctoral Training Centre. https://preston.web.ox.ac.uk/

She developed a fascination for plant pathology while studying Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. She studied for her doctorate under the inspiring mentorship of Prof. Alan Collmer at Cornell University, where she began to ask questions about the biology of plant pathogens that still inform her research today. How do environmental factors regulate pathogenicity and virulence mechanisms? How do pathogens manipulate the microenvironment inside host tissues? How does the environment inside and outside plants affect disease development?