Richard Harrison

Background

About Richard Harrison

I am the Managing Director of the Plant Sciences Group at Wageningen University and Research. As part of the management board of WUR I lead a group of ~1400 scientists working on government-funded and commercial research and development in the broad area of Plant Sciences and in education of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Prior to this I was Director of NIAB Cambridge Crop Research, a part of the NIAB Group, composed of research and service delivery in arable crop genetics, breeding, pathology, biotechnology and data science. Prior to this I worked as head of genetics at East Malling, which became part of NIAB in 2016. My own research focusses primarily on understanding the evolution and genetic basis of complex traits, such as interactions between plants and microbes, to provide scientific knowledge and solutions to underpin the sustainable development of the agricultural and horticultural industry. My group works at the intersection of molecular biology, biotechnology, machine learning and genetics. Through collaborative work with industrial partners in previous roles my team have delivered disease resistance traits into commercial breeding programmes of strawberry and apple against multiple primary disease threats in both crops. Following a Nuffield farming scholarship looking to the future of crop production, my interests have broadened to providing long-term data driven and modelling solutions to enable the design of systems that sustain both ecosystem services and food production, by integrating crop genetic variation, system-level crop performance and environmental simulation.