The International Phytobiomes Conference 2024 will bring together a broad community of U.S. and international scientists from the public and private sector as well as agricultural stakeholders.
The Conference program will cover a wide range of topics related to phytobiomes and the list of speakers & panelists below reflects the interdisciplinarity of phytobiome science.
This page is updated regularly as we receive confirmation from invited speakers.
Plenary Speakers
Gwyn Beattie
Iowa State University, US
Gwyn Beattie is a professor at Iowa State University in the U.S. where she holds an endowed Chair as the Robert Earle Buchanan Distinguished Professor of Bacteriology. Her research is exploring the mechanistic drivers of plant-bacteria-environment interactions, including how the abiotic environment dictates bacterial strategies for success on plant leaves and bacterial community development on plant roots. She is also investigating insect-vectored plant pathogens, with an interest in how climate change may be contributing to the emergence of plant diseases. Dr. Beattie is a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society, the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Annual Review of Phytopathology, and a founding member of the Board of Directors for the International Phytobiomes Alliance.
Terrence Bell
University of Toronto, CA
Terrence Bell is a soil microbial ecologist and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto – Scarborough. He is based in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, cross-appointed in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and is a member of the Sustainable Food and Farming Futures Cluster. His first faculty appointment was at Penn State University from 2017-2022, after working as a postdoctoral fellow at l’Université de Montréal and Cornell University. He earned his B.Sc. from Queen’s University, his M.Sc. from Western University, and his Ph.D. from McGill University. He has published >60 scientific articles, has received funding from varied sources, including the USDA, DOE, NSERC, and Genome Canada, and is currently a Senior Editor for ISME Communications. His work explores the constraints on microbial niche breadth and the extent to which niche breadth can be modified by new environmental pressures. This work has implications for both the intentional manipulation of microbes and microbiomes (e.g. microbial breedings) and incidental manipulations (e.g. global change factors).
Talk Title: The influence of near-term conditioning on microbial survival and function in phytobiomes
Catherine Feuillet
Inari, US
Catherine Feuillet received her Ph.D. in 1993 from the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse (France) and completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Zurich, focusing on the isolation of disease resistance genes and the genome structure and evolution of wheat and barley. Following her passion for wheat science, in 2004 Catherine was appointed research director by the INRA (French National Agricultural Research Institute) to lead and develop wheat genomics projects. Catherine joined Bayer CropScience in 2013 and became the head of trait research.
Since 2018, she has been the Chief Scientific Officer at Inari, the SEEDesign™ company working to solve the critical issues of food security and sustainability by designing nature-positive seed. Catherine leads a group of ~100 scientists (located in Cambridge, MA, USA and Ghent, Belgium) working to advance a technology platform that integrates A.I.-powered predictive design and advanced multiplex gene editing tools to develop seeds that meet the world’s needs – all in far less time and with much greater precision and far fewer resources than current approaches.
As one of the founders of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, Catherine was elected the French “golden woman of the year for research” in 2008. The following year, she received the “Prix Foulon” from the French Academy of Sciences for her achievements in wheat research. Her recognitions also include the Legion of Honour (2010), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011) and the “Prix J. Dufrenoy” from the French Academy of Agriculture (2012).
Catherine is dedicated to developing and guiding the next generation of scientists, having supervised the work of more than 30 master’s, Ph.D. and postdoc scientists. Her work has been published in more than 130 peer-reviewed journals and books.
Danica Lombardozzi
Colorado State University & National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), US
James Lowenberg-DeBoer
Harper Adams University, UK
James Lowenberg-DeBoer holds the Elizabeth Creak Chair in Agri-Tech Applied Economics at Harper Adams University (HAU), Newport, Shropshire, UK. He is responsible for economics in the Hands Free Farm (HFF) team at HAU. He is also past president of the International Society of Precision Agriculture (ISPA) and was co-editor of the journal Precision Agriculture 2016-2022.
His research focuses on the economics of agricultural technology, especially precision agriculture and crop robotics. Lowenberg-DeBoer’s research and outreach is founded in hands-on experience in agriculture, including production of corn and soybeans in NW Iowa in the USA.
Talk Title: Envisioning digital management of phytobiome systems
Speakers
Rebecca Bart
Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, US
Laramy Enders
Purdue University, US
