Prof. Mark Tester King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia

Mark Tester is Professor of Bioscience in the Center for Desert Agriculture and the Division of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering, at KAUST, in Saudi Arabia. He was previously in Adelaide, where he was a Research Professor in the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and Director of the... read moreAustralian Plant Phenomics Facility. Prof. Tester led the establishment of this Facility, a $55m organisation that develops and delivers state-of-the-art phenotyping facilities, including The Plant Accelerator, an innovative plant growth and analysis facility. In Australia, he led a research group in which forward and reverse genetic approaches were used to understand salinity tolerance and how to improve this in crops such as wheat and barley. He moved to KAUST in February 2013, where this work is continuing, expanding also into work on the salinity tolerance of tomatoes. Prof. Tester obtained his Bachelor’s degree in botany from the University of Adelaide in 1984, and his PhD in biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1988.