When: 10th April 2025 | 09:00 – 10:30 BST
The International Barley Hub is pleased to announce the next seminar in its 2025 series, run by leading barley scientists and industry experts. This seminar will be presented by Dr. Michael Kantar, Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i & Dr. Anna McCormick, Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Hawai’i.
Summary:
Crop diversity is an essential resource for national and international breeding programs aimed at preparing global agriculture for a changing climate. There are related risks that need to be evaluated (1) does the genetic diversity needed for climate adaptation exist somewhere? And (2) is such genetic diversity accessible? Many different methods have been proposed to evaluate these risks including Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy – FIGS, Core Collections, wild phylorelatives to determine crossing, and germplasm genomics with these methods achieving different levels of success. This talk will explore these methods and propose new methods of using germplasm collections to identify the most promising parents and use a case study of a global collection of barley landraces to explore pathways to operationalize these methods.
Speakers bio:
Professor Glen Fox:
Michael Kantar is an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa where he was appointed in 2016. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2013 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia 2013-2015. In 2019-2020 he was the chair of the Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee. In 2019 He was a senior BARD research fellow. He was a 2018 AAAS Leshner Leadership Institute Public Engagement Fellow. His research focuses on Plant Breeding, Neo-domestication, crop wild relatives, food security, and the genetic basis of local adaptation. He works extensively with people around the world actively collaborating with Kew Gardens in London, the International Rice Research institute in the Philippines and Center for Tropical Agriculture in Columbia, and AVRDC.
Dr. Anna McCormick
Dr. Anna McCormick is post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She has an MSc in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the University of Hawaii and PhD in Biochemistry from National University of Ireland, Galway. Her work has focused on exploring genetic diversity, species distributions, and developing new breeding strategies for adapting crops to climate change.