Prof. em. Dr. Wilhelm Gruissem

Wilhelm Gruissem is Professor for Plant Biotechnology at the ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) since 2000 and Co-Director of the Functional Genomics Center Zurich since 2001.  Before moving to Zurich, he was Professor of Plant Biology at the University of California at Berkeley from 1983-2000. He was Chair of the Department at UC Berkeley from 1993-1998 and Director of a collaborative research program with Novartis from 1998-2000. In 2008 he started the company Nebion. From 2006 to 2010 he was President of the European Plant Science Organization (EPSO) and in 2012 he was elected Chair and Acting President of the Global Plant Council for which he served until 2015. In addition to his research on systems biology, he directs a biotechnology program on trait improvement in cassava, rice and wheat. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the American Society of Plant Biologists, Editor of Plant Molecular Biology, and Co-Editor of the acclaimed book ‘Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of Plants’. He has received several prestigious awards, including prizes for his trait improvement work in cassava.