| 1. | Stuart Christie | 14. | Keith Little |
| 2. | Charlie Clarke | 6. | Andrew Morris |
| 2. | Bernie Dell | 15. | Zander Myburg |
| 11. | José Leonardo de Moraes Gonçalves | 7. | Prof. Brad Potts |
| 3. | Dr Geoff Downs | 16. | Mike Ryan |
| 12. | Dr Bill Dvorak | 8. | Evan Shield |
| 4. | Yousry A El-Kassaby | 17. | Michael J Wingfield |
| 13. | Dr Dario Grattapaglia | 9. | Daping Xu |
| 5. | John L Job |
Stuart Christie
His career also includes working for Shell International Renewables and Shell Forestry in Africa, Australasia and South America, where he was responsible for the development of biomass management systems and biomass business development in various bioclimatic regions as well as the technology management of Shell's forestry operations in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay.
In South Africa he was the project manager for Forest Management at Environmentek, a Division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. His team was responsible for the site classification and evaluation of more than 300 000 ha of forestry plantations as well as the development of integrated plantation decision support systems.
Stuart holds a PhD in Ecology, a BSc in Forestry (Honours) and a Higher Diploma in Terrain Evaluation.
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Stuart Christie joined Sustainable Forestry Management (SFM) as their Chief Operating Officer in March 2007. Prior to joining SFM, Stuart held the position of the Manager of Future Technology at SAPPI Limited, a global leader in the pulp and paper industry. Here he was responsible for developing an understanding of how new and emerging technologies and changes in institutional frameworks and policies could impact the role of paper as a communication, packaging and storage medium. In addition he was responsible for the management of Sappi's global technology programme as well as Sustainable Development with the Group, specifically contributing to Sappi's green house gas strategy and the development of an industry first Charter on Sustainable Development
Bernie Dell
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Professor Bernie Dell is currently Head of Plant Sciences, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. He has worked for more than 25 years on forest and field crops. His research interests in forestry include eucalypt silviculture, diagnosis and correction of nutrient disorders, plantation and nursery health, the selection of mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria for improving tree growth, and reforestation. He has wide experience of euacalypt and acacia plantations in Australia and East and South East Asia and has conducted field trials in China, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia. He has been project leader for both Industry and Government funded research and has trained to date, 31 PhD students and 6 Masters students. He regularly consults to plantation managers and R & D staff on silviculture of Australian trees in plantations. He has published ca. 200 research papers, books and technical reports.
José Leonardo de Moraes Gonçalves
Leonardo Gonçalves is currently Professor in Forest Soil and Plant Nutrition at the University of São Paulo's "Luiz de Queiroz" College of Agriculture (ESALQ), in Piracicaba. Before this he was a consultant scientist in the fields of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition. Leonardo has a Bachelor degree (Agronomy) and an MSc (Soil and Plant Nutrition) from Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil, as well as a PhD from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. This year he as appointed as Vice-Chief of the department of Forest Sciences at the University of São Paulo, and prior to this he was Coordinator of the Post-graduation Program in Forest Sciences. During this time he has supervised six PhD and 15 MSc students.
Since 1998, Leonardo has been Assistant Editor of the Journal of Brazilian Society of Soil Science. He has refereed 48 papers, delivered more than 60 conference presentations and produced a number of book chapters, journal papers, and technical reports. He is also the editor of two books on forest nutrition and plantation forestry.
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Hans Merensky Holdings Fellowship & Dr Geoff Downs
The company has a scheme whereby they invite, internationally recognised, knowledgeable persons who are active in the company's operational and business fields, to visit their operations in South Africa and gain exposure to the timber and subtropical fruit industries in general.
In support of the IUFRO 2007 WP2.08.03 conference on Eucalypts and diversity: balancing productivity and sustainability", it was decided to link this year's award, with the Conference. The recipient of the award is Dr Geoff Downes.
Dr Geoff Downes is currently the Leader of the Material Knowledge Group within Ensis Wood Quality. Geoff has been working to understand the causes of variability in wood properties for 20 years, with a focus on the physiology of wood formation as affected by environment. He has also had some involvement with the development and application of SilviScan, using the high-resolution wood property measurements, together with tree growth (dendrometer) monitoring, to investigate links between environment, growth and sub-annual wood variability. Geoff is based in Tasmania, Australia and leads a suite of projects including NIR prediction of pulp yield in the laboratory and field, fundamental causes of resin defects in New Zealand radiata pine and process-based modelling of wood formation.
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Hans Merensky Holdings is a major timber and subtropical fruit grower and processor with operations in three different provinces in South Africa. The company amongst others, owns and manages eucalypt and pine plantations grown for long term, sawlog production and processes the logs in five different sawmills.
Dr Bill Dvorak
Bill received his BS from Michigan State University and his MS and Ph. D. from North Carolina State University. He is Professor of Forestry at NC State and teaches a graduate level class on tropical forestry. He has published over 100 papers in the area of conservation, provenance/progeny variation, pine taxonomy, and the evolutionary history of the Central American and Mexican pines. North Carolina State University recently honored Bill by establishing a graduate fellowship in his name to financially support students working on tropical and subtropical tree species. Bill is currently a member of the FAO Panel of Experts on Forest Genetic Resources, representing the United States and Canada.
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Bill has been working in the tropics and subtropics for 33 years in the area of tree conservation and tree breeding. He began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Fiji Islands establishing provenance trials of Pinus oocarpa and Pinus caribaea. In 1980, he accepted the job of Director of Camcore, an international tree conservation & domestication program that is part of North Carolina State University and is funded primarily by private forest industry around the world. Currently Camcore has 31 members in 15 countries and is dominant force in international forestry.
Yousry A El-Kassaby
Yousry is currently Professor and Senior Industry-NSERC Research Chair in Applied Forest Genetics and Biotechnology in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He has a PhD from this University, as well as an MSc (Genetics) from the University of Tanta, Egypt and a BSc from the University of Alexandria, Egypt. Prior to his current post, Yousry worked in industry as the Director, Genetics and Product Development, CellFor Inc., and as Director, Applied Forest Research, Pacific Forest Products Ltd, both of these based in Victoria, British Columbia. Yousry is an active member of the Forest Genetic Resources' Panel of Experts of the Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations in Rome, and of the Science Council of British Columbia's Forest Genetics Research Review Committee, as well as the Council's Management of Ecosystem Productivity Program.
He has received 50 research grants in the area of Forest Genetics and Tree Improvement totalling an excess of $7M, and has authored and co-authored more than 200 refereed publications, book chapters and invited papers.
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Dr Dario Grattapaglia
As a professor or associate professor, between 1994 and 2006 he advised 33 undergraduate internships, 18 MSc thesis and five PhD dissertations and is currently advising four undergraduate, two MSc and two PhD students from different Brazilian Universities. He has published 54 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 36 full papers in conference proceedings, 22 book chapters and over 150 abstracts of congress presentations. He holds two patents in the area of marker assisted selection in forest trees derived from his PhD work at North Carolina State University.
Dario's main research interests are concentrated in all aspects of forest tree genetics, genomics and breeding mainly of planted fast-growing eucalypt species but also in the conservation genetics of tropical trees. He has also developed special interest in the genetics of human populations with an applied focus in forensics and has also developed genetic studies on the origin and composition of local bovine and horse breeds. In 1996 he founded Hereditas a private genotyping lab devoted to human paternity testing that evolved to include plant and domestic animal genotyping starting in 2000 under the name Genomax.
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Dario Grattapaglia is the current project leader of the Genolyptus Project, the Brazilian Network of Eucalyptus Genomic Research and a co-leader of the Eucalyptus Genome Sequencing project recently approved by the Joint Genome Institute of the US Department of Energy . Started in February 2002, Genolyptus is a pre-competitive project that includes seven Universities, 14 Brazilian pulp, paper and steel forest based industries and EMBRAPA, working together to build genomic resources for molecular breeding of eucalypts. Since 1994, Dario has been a research scientist with EMBRAPA Genetic Resources and Biotechnology, and since 2000, holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Genomic Science and Biotechnology Program of the Catholic University of Brasília. Dario's background is in forestry and genetics. He received his BSc in Forest Engineering in 1985 from the University of Brasília and a PhD in Genetics with a co-major in Forestry from North Carolina State University in 1994.
John L Job
John obtained his PhD in physical chemistry from McGill University in Montreal in 1973 and he completed his BSc Hons. degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1969. Having worked in the Chemical Industry which was, interalia, a supplier to the Forest Products Industry and having spent the last 8 years in one or other position in the latter Industry, both as an Executive as well as a Scientist, John is uniquely qualified to contribute to this Conference.
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John Job is currently the Chairman of the Board of Global Forest Products, a private company in the South African Forest Products Industry. Prior to this, John was a director of Sappi Ltd, both in an executive and subsequently non-executive capacity. During his 7 years of involvement with Sappi he held a number of senior management posts. He was head of the Forest Products Division from 1999 to 2003, and then CEO of Sappi Fine Paper North America in 2004. Throughout these years he was responsible for various corporate functions, the most significant of which was as Group Director of Technology, where he initiated a unique global technology management system which is still in use today. With the growing need for national coordination in a number of sectors in South African Industry, he was elected Chairman of Forestry South Africa, a post he filled from 2001 to 2003.
Keith Little
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Keith Little is currently the Programme Manager for the Re-establishment Research Programme at the ICFR, in Pietermaritzburg. He obtained a PhD in Botany from the University of Natal. Keith's field of expertise is in Vegetation and Coppice management, as well as in pine and eucalypt regeneration. Besides a real desire in helping others to realize their potential, current research interests include: reducing the current levels of forest vegetation management without compromising costs, productivity or sustainability, through a combination of reduced herbicide use and improved cultural weed control techniques; the development of a predictive weed control tool that will allow for the timeous management of competitive vegetation during the establishment of commercially planted species; the development of coppice management standards that will be applicable to all Eucalyptus species grown in South Africa; improving our understanding of the development of intra-specific competition as a function of silviculture; the conversion of results obtained from research into technology that can successfully be applied by foresters; and the development of silvicultural guidelines for multiple timber use by emerging growers.
Andrew Morris
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Andrew has a BSc (Hons) Soil Science (1976) from University of Reading, UK as well as a PhD (1987) from University of Reading, UK. Currently he is General Manager at the Sappi Shaw Research Centre, at Tweedie outside Pietermaritzburg, responsible for research and nurseries. Prior to this, Andrew was employed at Usutu Pulp Company (1979-1997) in forest research.
Prof Zander Myburg
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Prof Alexander Myburg is an associate professor in the Department of Genetics in the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. He received the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue his doctoral studies in the USA, and completed a PhD programme in Genetics and Forestry at the North Carolina State University in 2001. Upon his return to South Africa he established the Wood and Fibre Molecular Genetics Programme in collaboration with Sappi and Mondi Business Paper South Africa. This programme aims to develop biotechnology approaches for the improvement of wood fibre properties in fast-growing plantation trees in South Africa. He is serving as Vice-President of the South African Genetics Society and leads the International Eucalyptus Genome Network (EUCAGEN). He is also the lead investigator of the recently announced US Department of Energy (DOE) - Joint Genome Institute (JGI) project to sequence the Eucalyptus tree genome. Prof Myburg recently received the National Research Foundation President's Award for young researchers (P rating); the only one awarded in the country this year. He is the author of 26 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters on plant molecular genetics and genomics.
Prof. Brad Potts
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Brad Potts is the Professor of Forest Genetics in the School of Plant Science at the University of Tasmania. He is a program manager in the Cooperative Research Center for Forestry where he also leads their Biodiversity research project. He specializes on the genetics of eucalypts, and is well known for his collaborative work with both molecular and quantitative geneticists. He has undertaken extensive research on reproductive biology, hybridization and breeding, focusing on the temperate plantation species Eucalyptus globulus. He has published over 150 scientific articles and in 2006 was awarded a Doctor of Science for this work.
Mike Ryan
Mike Ryan is a Research Ecologist for the USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, and affiliate faculty of the Graduate Degree Program in Ecology at Colorado State University. His research focuses on forests and the carbon cycle, including forest productivity; changes in tree physiology and ecosystem processes with disturbance, recovery, and tree age; carbon allocation; the effects of global change; plant respiration; ecosystem respiration; soil carbon and nitrogen interactions; decomposition of soil carbon; carbon sequestration; fire and carbon cycling; and coordination of carbon, water, and nutrient cycles. Mike has led or participated in field research studies in the US (Colorado, Wyoming, Hawaii, New Mexico), Costa Rica, Canada, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia. Mike serves as an editor for Tree Physiology, is on the editorial review board of Plant, Cell and Environment, and is chair of the International Union of Forestry Research Organization's working group on Canopy Processes. Mike also works with forest managers in the Rocky Mountain to understand the ecological effects of fuels management treatments and carbon storage consequences of forest management. He received his B.S. from the University of Pittsburgh, M.S. from Northern Arizona University, and Ph.D. from Oregon State University and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
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Evan Shield
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Evan Shield is currently self-employed as a consultant in forestry and forest products, with special emphasis on Eucalyptus. He has undertaken consulting work for the past 25 years (1982 - 2007) and, during this period, he has been responsible for the conduct of assignments in some 26 countries on all continents. Evan has a BSc from the Univeristy of Queensland and a Diploma of Forestry with Distinction from the Australian Forestry School in Canberra. In addition he has a Diploma of Forestry from the University of Oxford. Evan has a number of years of experience working in the Forestry Industry; he was employed as a forester in public service in Papua New Guinea and worked in the forest industry in Tasmania, Australia for a large integrated forest products company. Since 1982, Evan has concentrated his consultant work on Eucalyptus management, utilization and marketing. He has produced detailed reports on strategies for the development of the Eucalyptus sector for the government of Uruguay, and delivered presentations on Eucalyptus management, utilization and marketing to Australian and international conferences and seminars. Currently, he is engaged on projects based in three African nations, together with others in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.
Michael J Wingfield
Mike received the Chancellors award, from University of Pretoria in 2002 and has been awarded the Persoon Medal Southern African Society for Plant Pathology four times in 42 years. In addition he was awarded the Scientific Achievement Award (2000) of the International Union for Forestry Research Organisations (IUFRO), and the distinguished alumnus award of the University of Minnesota. He received the National Science and Technology Forum (NSTF) national award for contributions to Science and Technology. In 2005, he was awarded the gold medal of the Southern African Association for the Advancement of Science and in the same year, the Laureatus Award of the University of Pretoria. Mike is a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and the Southern African Society for Plant Pathology. He serves on a number of Boards and Committees including the Scientific advisory committee (WeCo) Centraabureau voor Schimmelcultures, Holland, the board of the International Union of Forestry Research Organisations (IUFRO, Vienna), the board of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Research Committee of the Hans Merensky Foundation.
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Mike is the Professor and founder director of the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute, University of Pretoria. Concurrently, he is also the director of the DST/NRF Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology and Tree Protection Co-operative Programme (TPCP). He has a PhD in Plant Pathology and Entomology (1983; University of Minnesota), and is a past President of Southern African Society for Plant Pathology and past Vice President, International Society for Plant Pathology.
Daping Xu
He is also Chief Scientist and Manager for the National Key Project (2001-2005) "Tree Improvement and Cultivation of major broad-leaf tree plantation in southern China". This project covers breeding and silviculture of eucalypts, Acacias, Teak and other broad-leaf timber tree species in southern China. The aims of this project are to provide new qualified hybridized clones of eucalypts and Acacias, and qualified clones of Teak and other broad-leaf timber tree species; to produce qualified seeds for plantation forestry in southern China; to increase productivity of broad-leaf tree plantations by silvicultural techniques; and to sustain long term productivity of short rotation plantations (eucalypts and Acacias) for successive rotations. Daping is also Project manager of the project "Ecological impacts of exotic tree plantations in south China". This project mainly concentrates on impacts of large area short rotation plantation establishment on regional water balance, soil fertility and biodiversity. He has published a number of papers in peer-reviewed journals.
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Daping Xu is currently Director and Research Professor in The Research Institute of Tropical Forestry, The Chinese Academy of Forestry. He holds a BSc (Forestry) and an MSc (Forest Ecology) both from Nanjing Forestry University. He also has a PhD in Plant Nutrition from Murdoch University, Australia. Since 198, Daping has held a number of research positions at The Research Institute of Tropical Forestry at The Chinese Academy of Forestry including Associate Research Professor and full Research Professor. Since 2002 he has held the post of Chief Research Professor for silviculture and plantation management, as well as Director of the Institute.