Andrzej Kilian (Director)

E-mail: a.kilianDiversityArrays.com

Andrzej is the founder and Director of DArT P/L. He is leading the company, contributing primarily to business and technology development. A significant part of his role is the promotion of DArT and DArT P/L both in Australia and internationally. He has delivered nearly 100 seminars and presentations, including plenary talks at international conferences. Andrzej's commitment to the broadest possible delivery of DArT is fulfilled primarily through his efforts towards building the DArT Network . Andrzej is active in graduate and postgraduate education mainly as a supervisor of several PhD candidates registered at the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and University of Sydney.

After completing his PhD on population genetics of Arabidopsis thaliana at the Silesian University, Poland, Andrzej spent a year (1988) as a Postdoctoral Fellow funded by the FAO/IAEA at the Plant Breeding Institute (PBI) in Cambridge, England. He was working with Dr. Mike Gale on comparative RFLP mapping of barley and wheat, contributing to the first indication of extensive RFLP map colinearity among cereals (synteny). While at PBI, he also collaborated with Dr. Richard Jefferson in the first field release and analysis of a genetically engineered food crop.

After two years (1989-1990) as an Assistant Professor of Genetics at Silesian University, Andrzej spent several years as a visiting professor at Washington State University (Andy Kleinhofs lab) in the North American Barley Genome Mapping Program. While in the United States, Andrzej cloned barley Telomere Associated Sequences that allowed genetic mapping of almost all barley telomeres. He was the first to report telomerase activity in plants and to show that the enzyme is developmentally regulated. Andrzej's research in the early 90' provided the first comprehensive proof of microsynteny among cereal genomes. In 1996 Andrzej worked as a Visiting Fellow at the Rice Genome Project in Tsukaba, Japan, continuing the research on rice-barley microsynteny.

Andrzej joined CAMBIA in 1996 and within several months cloned the catalytic subunit of human telomerase, a major cancer research target. At CAMBIA he established and led the Genomics program which developed several breeding-related technologies. TransGenomics, which aims at creating phenotypic variation through modification of genetic networks, has been broadly adopted in China, where several hundred thousands transgenic plants were generated using this technology. In 1997 Andrzej invented Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT) and spent several years developing this technology within CAMBIA, until the establishment of DArT P/L in 2001.

Andrzej has a strong interest and involvement in international agricultural research, especially in developing and delivering technologies that could benefit resource-poor farmers. In this context he was advising FAO and several CGIAR organisations (e.g. IITA and IRRI). Andrzej was selected as one of the 10 best Australian scientists in 2004 according to The Bulletin/Microsoft plebiscite.

Selected publications

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