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Stephan Weise
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Stephan Weise and Jim Lorenzen have been elected as the new chair and vice-chair of the ISHS banana and plantain section. At the next ISHS congress, in August 2010, the newly elected chair and vice-chair will take over from Richard Markham and Victor Galán Saucó, who had been appointed as interim chairpersons when the section was created in 2006.
Weise is a Canadian/Swiss national with a PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Before joining Bioversity International as the Director of its Commodities for Livelihoods programme in June this year, he was the regional manager of the Sustainable Tree Crops Programme (STCP) at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ghana. In his new position, Weise hopes to continue developing commodity-based innovation system approaches, encouraging the sharing of knowledge, information and technologies across stakeholders, and integrating the generation of income with sustainable natural resource management practices.
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Jim Lorenzen
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Lorenzen is a banana breeder at IITA, based in Uganda. He is also the programme leader for banana and plantain systems. His research program focuses on resistance breeding, molecular genetics and development of genomic tools, response to drought, and improved seed systems. Prior to joining the banana research community, he spent more than 20 years as a potato breeder and researcher at the University of Idaho and the North Dakota State University, before which he was Research Advisor to the National Potato Development Programme of Nepal.
The responsibilities of the section chair and vice-chair include guiding the working groups in the section, supporting the organization of ISHS symposia, overseeing the electronic newsletter InfoMus@, promoting and representing the society, and liaising with the board through the secretariat. The vice-chair supports the chair in all aspects of the management of the section and acts on behalf of the chair whenever the chair is not in a position to represent the section.
For more information, contact Inge Van den Bergh.