Dr Celine Mens is a research fellow within the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Science at the University of Queensland. She obtained her PhD in 2022 on the characterisation of molecular signals involved in nitrogen-dependent regulation of legume nodulation. Now, she focuses on mungbean genomics for the improvement of nitrogen fixing effectiveness through exploration of the pan-genome and natural diversity present in a mungbean core collection.

Hyeonah Shim received her PhD degree in 2024 from Seoul National University in South Korea and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany. Her work focuses on the faba bean pangenome, constructing chromosome level assemblies of multiple faba bean genotypes. She is interested in evaluating the pangenome of faba bean to explore structural diversity in this sp

Hon-Ming Lam is Choh-Ming Li Professor of Life Sciences at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on climate-smart and sustainable agriculture, plant and agricultural biotechnology, and genomic studies on crop–environment interactions and domestication.

Ute has a long-standing international reputation and expertise in cereal bioinformatics and genomics, and in recent years has turned her attention to legumes and other commercial crops. Ute uses bioinformatics to investigate the genetic control of economically important traits. Her interest in genome and genetic diversity has also led to the development of bioinformatic tools to visualize and mine genomic resources to identify allelic variation underlying loci of interest. Other projects have investigated transcriptome developmental changes, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. Ute has supervised fourteen doctoral students in plant genetics and genomics.

Dr Soledad Perez-Santangelo is a newly appointed lecturer in plant molecular biology at the School of Biological Sciences (SBS), University of Auckland, NZ. She completed her PhD at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, investigating the role of alternative splicing in regulating circadian rhythms in Arabidopsis. She moved to NZ in 2018 for a postdoctoral position at the University of Otago, focusing on the photoperiodic regulation of flowering time in the model legume Medicago truncatula. Later, she received a Marsden Fast-Start grant from the NZ Royal Society to investigate how genetic variation in circadian rhythms affects plant performance in M. truncatula. In February 2024, she opened her laboratory at SBS, which focuses on the molecular understanding of how the circadian clock integrates and responds to environmental cues and modulates plant physiology in a changing climate, in legume species.

Irfan completed his Ph.D. in Plant Science at McGill University. During his Ph.D. training, Irfan characterized the germination associated thaumatin-like proteins in barley through the exploitation of bioinformatics, molecular biology, proteomics, and chemical biology related tools. His research interests include gene discovery, protein engineering and expression and gene editing for crop improvement. At GIFS, Irfan joined the OPAL platform/Plant Improvement Program with Dr. Andrew Sharpe to establish genomic resources of alfalfa for the development of drought and salt-tolerant germplasm. He is utilizing long-read and short-read technologies to develop highly contiguous, high-quality reference genomes and pangenome for alfalfa.