A/Prof Nijat Imin has a PhD degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the Australian National University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University prior to joining the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Legume research as a Research Fellow. In 2022, He took up a tenured Associate Professor position in the School of Science at the Western Sydney University, where we directs and teaches various undergraduate and graduate courses related to Plant Biology. He has supervised and has been supervising over a dozen PhD students and many more Honours/Masters students. Dr. Imin leads a team to investigate how plants coordinate growth, development and responses to the environment. In particular, his team studies how plant signalling peptides regulate nutrient update and root nodule formation.

Brett Williams is a research group leader and senior lecturer in the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences at the Queensland University of Technology. He received his BS and PhD at QUT in the laboratory of Distinguished Professor James Dale, where he focused on developing a novel virus-inducible protein expression system in plants. Following his PhD studies, Brett travelled to Texas A & M University in the USA, where he worked in the lab of Distinguished Professor Martin Dickman, studying plant Programmed Cell Death (PCD) pathways in response to biotic and abiotic stimuli. In 2010, Brett returned to QUT to study the stress tolerance responses of the Australian resurrection plant, Tripogon loliiformis, before receiving QUT Vice Chancellor’s and Advance QLD Research Fellowships to explore cell death pathways in Tripogon loliiformis and perform Australia’s first GM chickpea trial, respectively. Today, Brett and his lab are investigating the role of energy metabolism in regulating cell death and senescence pathways in resilient species and translating this fundamental knowledge to improve important crop species such as Chickpea. Brett’s research has led to several fundamental discoveries, including; - Improved chickpea drought tolerance and nodulation, increased seed protein content in GM chickpea. - The dispersal of Arabidopsis Bcl-2 athanogene (BAG) family in various sub-cellular organelles. - The observation that the Arabidopsis BAG family plays a central role in regulating programmed cell death pathways. - The tight regulation of autophagy pathways by naturally resilient plant species to tolerate stress - The suppression of stress-related senescence pathways in naturally resilient species to tolerate extreme climates - Suppression of host defence pathways by Sclerotinia sclerotiorum secreted oxalic acid - Temporal induction of plant PCD pathways as a key pathogenicity factor of the potent necrotrophic fungus Sclerotinia sclerotiorum

lennart scheer is a phd student in the department of plant breeding at jlu, specializing in the field of drought stress adaptation in faba beans. his research primarily focuses on conducting multi-environment trials and controlled experiments using the state-of-the-art droughtspotterxxl facility. the objective of his research is to identify key physiological traits that play a crucial role in determining faba bean yield under drought conditions. to achieve this, he employs advanced high-throughput and high-resolution phenotyping techniques, such as 3d and multi-spectral scans, to obtain detailed information on the plant's response to drought stress.

Shiva Azizinia is a research scientist at Agriculture Victoria Research, specializing in computational biology and agricultural data analysis and modeling, holding a PhD in plant breeding and genetics. Before joining AVR, Shiva worked as a canola breeder at the Agriculture Research Institute. While at the University of Tehran, She supervised graduate and undergraduate students in agriculture. She is highly experienced in managing plant breeding projects both in the field and greenhouse, encompassing the full cycle of breeding programs. Her research primarily focuses on genomic prediction of various agronomic traits in agricultural plant species to support genomic selection in commercial breeding programs. Shiva has published research in fundamental agricultural science in scientific journals and presented at conferences.

Alem Gebre is a research scientist at Agriculture Victoria who is currently working on genome-assisted breeding for legume crops. His main job is to develop genome-assisted breeding pipelines using genomics and computational approaches.

Dr Abeya Tefera completed his PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Queensland, Australia. Currently he is working as a research scientist in molecular plant breeding team of Agriculture Victoria Research. His research focuses on lentil and field pea high-throughput phenotyping. He has been using ground and aerial based remote sensing for phenotyping of breeding lines.