Dr Delphine Fleury has been appointed Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Hub for Wheat in a Hot and Dry Climate here at Waite, taking over from previous Director, Dr Sigrid Heuer.
Delphine completed her PhD on sunflower genetics in 2001 at the ENSAT (Toulouse, France), followed by postdoctoral training in 2005 at the Department of Plant Systems Biology on leaf development in Arabidopsis (VIB, Ghent, Belgium). Delphine joined the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics at the Waite in 2006. She runs the genetics program aiming to improve the tolerance of wheat and barley to drought using quantitative genetics, physiology and omics. Her group particularly focused on the positional cloning of quantitative trait loci increasing yield under low rain-fed conditions.
The ARC Research Hub for Wheat in a Hot and Dry Climate brings together wheat researchers and Australia’s three major wheat breeding companies to exploit global diversity for wheat and advanced genomic technologies for faster development of heat and drought tolerant varieties which make better use of nitrogen fertiliser.
“It’s my greatest pleasure to take on the direction of the Hub, and continue our research to improve wheat quality and yield for Australia,” Delphine said.
