Professor Chris Gilligan holds a personal chair in Mathematical Biology in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, where he leads the Epidemiology and Modelling Group. His research is focused on the development and use of models to predict the spread of plant disease and to identify optimal strategies for the control of disease at scales ranging from on-farm to the landscape, regional and continental. Current applications involve models to inform the control of crop disease in the UK, US, Africa and India, as well as diseases of trees in natural vegetation in the USA and UK. His research group is contracted by the UK Government to provide emergency modelling support to respond to emerging epidemics of plant disease. Professor Gilligan also works at the interface between epidemiology and economics and on longer-term models to predict future demands for energy, land and water.

Professor Gilligan has served as Head (Dean) of Biological Sciences, one of six academic schools at Cambridge. He currently chairs the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee (the public body that advises the UK Government and Devolved Administrations on UK-wide and international nature conservation). He also holds a Prime Ministerial appointment as Trustee of the Natural History Museum in London. He chaired the recent UK Government Taskforce on Tree Heath and Plant Biosecurity; he was chair of the Science Advisory Council for the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) (2011-14) and served two terms as a member of the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (2003-2009). He has chaired a number of other national reviews including UK research in crop science and animal health. He is a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a Professorial Fellow of King’s College Cambridge and a past President of the British Society for Plant Pathology.

Roger Innes is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Indiana University-Bloomington, and currently directs IUB’s Electron Microscopy Center. He received his Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and completed Post-doctoral research at the University of California-Berkeley. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology.

 Dr. Innes’ research focuses on the immune system in plants, with a particular interest in how plants detect pathogens and how detection is translated into an active immune response. His group was among the first to identify and clone plant disease resistance genes using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and revealed that the great majority encode proteins containing nucleotide binding domains and leucine rich repeats (NLRs).  Most NLR proteins are now known to detect pathogen effector proteins indirectly, via detecting modification of effector targets. These insights are now leading to new approaches for engineering disease resistance in plants.

In a second area of research, the Innes laboratory has been investigating intracellular and intercellular signaling and cell biology of the plant immune system, including analysis of endomembrane trafficking in plant cells and production of extracellular vesicles. The release of extracellular vesicles is upregulated during pathogen infection and these vesicles carry numerous defense-related proteins, as well as microRNAs, suggesting an important role in immune responses

Linda Kinkel is a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Minnesota.  She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Plant Pathology and M.S. in Biometry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and completed Post-doctoral research at the University of California-Berkeley.

 Dr. Kinkel’s research focuses on the ecology and evolutionary biology of plant-associated microbes in native and agricultural habitats.  She is especially interested in developing practical approaches for managing the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of antagonistic soil bacteria to enhance disease suppression.  Her current work integrates metagenomics analyses of soil and endophytic microbiomes in relation to pathogen suppression, plant host and plant community diversity, and soil carbon dynamics in agricultural and native prairie soils.  She is actively involved in the American Phytopathological Society’s Phytobiomes Initiative, and is an Associate Editor-in-Chief for the new Phytobiomes Journal.  

Mark Hoddle is an Extension Specialist in biological control and Director of the Center for Invasive Species Research at the University of California, Riverside. Hoddle received his BSc and MSc in Zoology from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and his Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the USA. Hoddle's research focuses primarily on the classical biological control of invasive arthropod pests affecting agricultural, urban, and wilderness areas.