Visitors and past employees

We have hosted a range of visitors from all around the world:

• Mona Akbari. Mona performed the initial proof of concept experiments on wheat, showing the sceptic that YES, DArT could work on a large polyploid genome like wheat. After taking time off to expand her family, Mona is now working at Plant Health Australia, the national coordinating body for plant health in Australia.
• Hania Bolibok. Hania is an Associate Professor at the Department of Plant Genetics, Breeding, and Biotechnology in Warsaw Agricultural University in Poland. Her visit was very short, but still Rye array materialized and we hope to continue working on this species.
• Aurélie Bonin. Who could approach the frog DArT project more seriously than Aurélie? Probably nobody. Coming from the Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine in Grenoble, France, Aurélie showed great dedication and resolve, trying to "jump"-start this project. Her smile and lab manners were missed, but she must have liked us to come back for the whole year, this time to work on mosquitos.
• Sophie Bouchet. Sophie is a PhD Student from CIRAD in France and worked with us on sorghum and coconut. She produced a lot of data and hopefully she will be back for another few months.
• Arianna Bruzzone. Arianna visited us twice to kick-start the work on cattle DArT. Her positive spirit was essential to deal with the first humble steps of DArT for mammals in collaboration. Arianna is now dedicating most of her time to her family, but we haven't given up hope for her return.
• Ilaria Catizone. Ilaria joined us to work on DArT for durum wheat and visited Canberra twice. Her first visit was supported by a stipend from Bologna University (Ilaria was a student of Prof. R. Tuberosa). She is still in Canberra, managing the 'Green Machine' situated in CSIRO's Discovery Centre, and is also socially involved with various members of the DArT team.
• Cyril Cayla. IT specialist from France. Over 2 years he has been developing DArTsoft, the data extraction and data analysis software, which is used by DArT to obtain the polymorphic marker scores. His image analysis skills were put to the test, when we were designing an efficient tool to process images of hybridised microarrays of varying quality and extract from them the relevant numerical data. He also coded the algorithms for polymorphism detection and scoring. Cyril went back to Europe in April 2005. After working for imaging company Agfa in Belgium, he took off to Brazil to participate in IT projects on natural resource management in the Amazons. Now he is back in Europe - or most likely traveling somewhere else - Cyril's and Karen's site is here.
• Prof. Yong-Gu Cho. The two visits of Prof. Cho from Chungbuk National University in Chongju, South Korea, were a "tour the force" in the initial development of DArT-MITE for rice. His dedication and hard work were very inspirational to the rest of us.
• Andrew Craig. Andrew works for the South Australian Research and Development Institute. He visited us twice to establish DArT for fungal pathogens of barley (notblotch, scald). He's now working on his PhD thesis back home in Adelaide.
• Evelyn Hackl. Evelyn visited us from ARCS in Seibersdorf, Austria, bringing with her a lot of complex microbial DNA samples to test an equally complex range of complexity reduction methods. She worked hard and managed to produce the first exciting results just on time for her holidays. We hope she'll cultivate DArT back home in Austria.
• Marianne Konrad-Koeszler. Marianne visited us from ARCS, Austria, with a DVD full of microarray images from experiments to evaluate DArT for molecular phage typing of Salmonella species. She quickly analysed her images with DArTsoft, and the results looked so promising that some of us may be considering retraining to become microbiologists.
• Pavan Krishna. Our former systems administrator, who helped us to establish our independent IT infrastructure and did it well as you have this site in front of your eyes.
• David Kudrna. David visited us from Prof. Andris Kleinhof's lab at Washington State University. He started work on establishing DArT for barley. His contributions to technology development and general lab spirit were significant, as were his bushwalking weekends in Canberra's national parks. David is now working at the Arizona Genomics Institute in Tuscon, USA.
• Rongbai Li. Rongbai came to DArT P/L from the Guangxi Agricultural Sciences Academy in Nanning, China. He worked on rice DArT and significantly contributed to the development of a mapping population to genetically localise rice DArT markers.
• Ali Mehrabi. Ali is a PhD student at Teheran University, Iran, working on wild relatives of wheat. He spent five very productive months with us and generated an enormous amount of data that will shed new light on the evolution and domestication of wheat. We all hope he'll be back in the future.
• Sujin Patarapuwadol. Sujin was a PhD student and for several years she was contributing to development of DArT for rice. As she was part of the landscape, it is hard to believe that she is now back in Thailand.
• Kaiman Peng. Kaiman has contributed substantially to the initial development of DArT. She joined Andrzej's team at CAMBIA from Wuhan, China. Her work on rice was an essential contribution to the proof-of-concept paper. Her work on methylation profiling and MITE display-based DArT (DArT-MITE) opened new avenues for DArT applications. At DArT P/L, she was the main force behind the initial development of DArT for cassava (Xia et al., 2005, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 110: 1092-1098). She is currently working with array platforms at the BRF, Australian National University.
• Chandrika Perera. Our first visitor from Sri Lanka, she worked on coconut in the project part of the Generation Challenge Program. Her friendliness and wide smile will not be forgotten.
• Ange Marie Risterucci. Visiting from CIRAD France, Ange worked for a three months developing arrays for bananas in the project part of the Generation Challenge Program. His help during DArT relocation is warmly remembered and his work is now continued by Sophie.
• Alexander Wittenberg. After a few months at DArT P/L in 2004, he decided that he needed more. Alexander comes from PRI in Wageningen, Netherlands. Supported by the Dutch Genomics Program, he has spent the whole of 2005 with us.
• Prapit Wongtiem. Prapit visited us from the Rayong Field Crops Research Center in Rayong, Thailand, as a trainee of IPGRI and the Generation Challenge Program. Within a three-month visit, she not only learnt the techniques, but also analysed most of the nearly 500 cassava samples waiting for her. Prapit came back for another 9 months in 2005 to continue our work in cassava as part of the Generation Challenge Program
• Zong Xuxiao. Visiting from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, Zong initiated the project on chickpea DArT. We are looking forward to his next visit!
• Shi Ying Yang. Shi Ying was an associate professor at the Institute of Crop Genetic Resources, Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences in China when she joined our team in August 2003 to do a PhD, as a student from Charles Sturt University. Shi Ying has expertise in genetics and agronomy of grain legumes. Her successful project on the development and application of DArT for pigeon pea was completed at the end of 2006. During her time with us, Shi Ying also contributed to the overall technology development of DArT, most notably for other tropical and legume species. She has now moved to Adelaide in South Australia to pursue her scientific career.