From left to right: Jozef Van Assche, Roderick Drew, Jens-Norbert Wünsche, Jill Stanley, Silvana Nicola, Ryutaro Tao, Yves Desjardins, YükselTüzel. Source: www.ishs.org/news/new-ishs-board-2014-2018.
The new Board members with their respective responsibilities for the next four years are:
- Prof. Dr. Roderick Drew (Australia) as President of the ISHS and Chairperson of the Board - His research interest is biotechnology of tropical and subtropical horticultural crops. He is best known for his work on Carica papaya. His research in papaya has covered micropropagation, cryopreservation, embryo rescue and plantlet recovery, traditional breeding, marker assisted breeding, intergeneric hybridisation between papaya and related Vasconcellea species, development of molecular markers and identification of genes that control PRSV-P resistance in Vasconcellea species. He has published more than 150 journal papers, book chapters and invited review papers and in excess of 50 of these have been on Carica papaya. He is President of the Australian Society for Horticultural Science.
- Prof. Dr. Silvana Nicola (Italy) as Vice-President and Vice-Chairperson of the Board, Responsible for the Scientific Activities of the Society - She conducts research on the effect of pre-harvest environmental factors on quality and safety of fresh and fresh-cut produce, especially leafy vegetables and culinary herbs, on fresh-cut produce chain and aromatic plant production and post-harvest processes. She has worked since 1988 in Horticultural Sciences and Development on seedling and transplant biology and physiology, soil and soilless culture, protected cultivation, pre- and post-harvest handling and processing, post-harvest physiology and technology, quality and safety, and supply chain management. She is actively involved in R&D, quality and safety assurance, GAPs and other international certifications with private companies and international bodies, FAO and WHO among others. She was elected Chair of the ISHS Section Vegetables in 2006 and re-elected in 2010.
- Prof. Dr. Ryutaro Tao (Japan) as Treasurer, Responsible for the Financial Affairs of the Society - His research interest is the reproduction biology of fruit trees, such as the S-RNase-based self-incompatibility system in Prunus, the sexual system in Diospyros, and floral induction in Diospyros and Rosaceae. He has also been involved in improvement of fruit trees by means of tissue culture and transgenic techniques. He is currently Chair of the ISHS Working Group on Cherry Production in the Commission Pome and Stone Fruits and is organizing the 8th ISHS International Cherry Symposium that will be held in June, 2017, in Yamagata, Japan.
- Prof. Dr. Yves Desjardins (Canada) as Responsible for Publications - He is Director of Academic and International Affairs at the Institute for Nutraceutical and Functional Food (INAF). Being involved in research on health effects of fruit and vegetables, he organized in 2005 the first International Symposium on Health Effects of Fruit and Vegetables (FAVHEALTH, Quebec City, Canada) under the auspices of ISHS. The goal of this symposium series was to create a unique forum for researchers from different disciplines, like horticulture, nutrition and health sciences, to meet formally and bridge the communication gap between agriculture and medical sciences. He became Chair of the ISHS Commission “Fruits and Vegetables and Health” in 2006. The FAVHEALTH series is very popular and continues to be an important platform to share new information on health effects on fruit and vegetables.
- Jill Stanley (New Zealand) as Secretary, Responsible for Communications of ISHS, Editor of Chronica Horticulturae - Her research speciality is horticultural physiology, mainly focusing on understanding the physiological processes of tree and fruit development to improve productivity and fruit quality. She is passionate about using physiological understanding to provide practical solutions for growers. Her projects are wide-ranging but she has most recently focused on developing a range of orchard and postharvest strategies to improve consistent fruit quality of apricots, both for existing cultivars and newly bred cultivars being developed at Plant & Food Research.
- Prof. Dr. Jens-Norbert Wünsche (Germany) as Responsible for Innovation, Outreach and Strategy and Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Horticultural Science (eJHS) - He is a crop physiologist, specializing in plant/fruit physiology of temperate and (sub)tropical crop species. He attempts to combine hormone and carbohydrate physiology with molecular biology, targeted at identifying the genetic and physiological basis of flower induction and fruit abscission, but also at processes involved in fruit growth and fruit quality in response to environmental and/or crop management triggers during the pre- and postharvest period. He is currently the President of the German Society for Horticultural Sciences (DGG) and the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Horticultural Science (eJHS), a Board Member of the Centre for Agriculture in the Tropics and Subtropics at the University of Hohenheim and of the Centre of Competency for Fruit Science at Lake Constance.
- Prof. Dr. YükselTüzel (Turkey) as President of the XXXth International Horticultural Congress - Her expertise is vegetable production technologies in greenhouses. She has worked in soilless culture systems, irrigation and fertilization management, abiotic stress response and grafting. In 2000 she started to work on organic greenhouse vegetable production. Presently, she is involved in a project to increase local input use of organic agriculture, and she is responsible for seedling production, which includes experiments on substrates, nutrition programs, the use of beneficial organisms and grafting.
- Ir. Jozef Van Assche (Belgium) as Executive Director of the ISHS - Jozef Van Assche became the executive manager of a Beverages and Foods Group from 1987 till 1993. In 1993 he returned to the world of science and joined the staff of the ISHS. He was appointed Executive Director in 1995. He is determined to bring horticultural science to the benefit of all, including researchers in the developing world, and together with the ISHS team to serve the horticultural profession as a whole.
Further info: www.ishs.org/news/chronica-horticulturae-volume-54-number-3
Contact:
Ms. Silvana Nicola, PhD
DISAFA
Department of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences – Università di Torino, Italy
Email: silvana.nicola@unito.it