Dr. Mark Tester

Professor of Bioscience, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Mark Tester is Professor of Bioscience at KAUST, Saudi Arabia. After a Ph.D. in Cambridge and lectureship there, he went to Adelaide, as a Research Professor in the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and Director of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility. Mark 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 his research group, forward and reverse genetic approaches are used to understand salinity tolerance and improve this in crops such as barley and tomatoes. He led a group who sequenced the quinoa genome, which has been recently accepted for publication in Nature.