Wen-Ming Wang obtained his PhD degree in 1997 from Sichuan Agricultural University and has postdoc expertise in Rutgers University, University of Arizona, and University of Maryland in U.S.A. Now he is a Professor of Plant Pathology at State Key Laboratory of Crop Gene Exploitation and Utilization in Southwest China, Sichuan Agricultural University. He is also the President of Sichuan Society of Plant Pathology, Associate editor of Phytopathology Research, Handling editor of the Journal of Experimental Botany. His lab works on miRNA-mediated coordination of growth and development with immunity against the blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae, and on resistance mechanisms of rice false smut and Arabidopsis powdery mildew. He has presided over more than 10 projects, including key project of National Natural Science Foundation of China and other provincial and ministerial level projects. His research has led to more than 100 papers published in academic journals, including Molecular Plant, Nature Plants, and Plant Cell.

Agricultural Engineer NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF COLOMBIA
Master in Plant Breeding UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA
Ph.D. in Crop Protection UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE COLOMBIA
Research Associate of the CIAT Rice Project 1994-2015
Professor of Plant Pathology at the UNIVERSIDAD DEL PACIFICO – BUENA VENTURA,
COLOMBIA 2005-2012
Consultant of FLAR FROM 2015 TO PRESENT.
Consultant in INTEGRATED PEST AND DISEASE MANAGEMENT for companies:
AGRICOLA MIRAMONTES-NICARAGUA FROM 2013 TO PRESENT, ADECO
AGROPECUARIA-ARGENTINA FROM 2018 TO PRESENT, GRUPO MAGDALENANICARAGUA 2022 TO PRESENT.
Consultant for companies formulating and producing bioinputs for agricultural use.

Yong-Hwan Lee obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Plant Pathology in 1983 and 1985, respectively, from Seoul National University. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from Louisiana State University in 1991, he worked as a visiting scholar at Clemson University for two years before returning to Korea as a Senior Research Scientist at LG Chem Ltd. In 1995, he re-joined Seoul National University and is SNU Distinguished Professor. His research has focused on multi-pronged approaches to attain a comprehensive understanding of the molecular and genomic basis of rice blast disease. From his more than 30 years of research, the impact of his work is widely acknowledged through the scope of a wet lab approaches applied to dissect the mechanisms of infection as well as the powerful bioinformatics platforms created for comparative and evolutionary fungal genomics.

Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Colorado. She received an NIH post-doctoral fellowship to train as a fungal molecular geneticist at Cornell University. While there, she proposed and began developing the rice blast fungus, Magnaporthe oryzae Oryza, as a model for fungal plant pathogens. Valent joined the DuPont Company in 1985 to pursue rice blast research and develop control strategies for this fungus, which remains a global threat to rice production. She rose to DuPont Research Fellow before moving to Kansas State University in 2001. Valent’s rice blast research uses functional genomics and live cell microscopy to understand how the fungus hijacks living rice cells to cause disease. Valent is also a leader in research on wheat blast, caused by the recently emerged wheat-adapted lineage, M. oryzae Triticum (MoT). After spreading in South America since 1985, MoT moved to Bangladesh in 2016 and to Zambia in 2018. Since 2009, Valent has led USDA-NIFA funded interdisciplinary teams of research and extension specialists from diverse institutions in the U.S. and worldwide in order to develop rapid detection and response resources aimed at preventing further disease spread. She attended the 1st International Wheat Blast Workshop (Brazil, 2010) and helped found the International Wheat Blast Consortium for coordinating global research on MoT. Her research also focuses on MoT genome variability and evolutionary trajectory. Valent is a Fellow of both the American Phytopathological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Graduated from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 2008 with a PhD in Crop Genetics and Breeding. He then spent three years at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences conducting postdoctoral research on FHB resistance in oats and wheat. In 2011, he joined CIMMYT, where he has been working on wheat pathology, focusing on wheat blast, FHB, and leaf spot diseases.

Research and professional experience:
1984-1990: Assistant Professor, Faculty of Agriculture, Kochi University.
1991-1995: Associate Professor in the Faculty of Agriculture, Kochi University.
1992: Visiting Researcher at the Department of Plant Pathology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, under the direction of Prof. S.A. Leong
1996-2005: Associate Professor in the College of Agriculture, Kobe University
2006- Lecturer in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, Kobe University

Member of academic societies:
Phytopathological Society of Japan
American Phytopathological Society
American Society of Plant Biologists

He has significant research expertise and experience in deciphering the molecular interactions between plant microbes, including the pathosystems of rice and common wheat. Naweed received his PhD from Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, India, and the International Rice Research Institute, Philippines, in 1995. He worked as a Rockefeller Foundation Project Scientist at IRRI until 1997, before joining the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology (Singapore) as a postdoctoral fellow; and then as a Principal Investigator focusing on fungal pathobiology and disease resistance. He is currently the prestigious Temasek Principal Investigator at the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (Singapore) and an adjunct professor at the National University of Singapore.

Rice pathologist at CIRAD (Montpellier, France). He has 30 years of experience in the interaction between rice and Magnaporthe oryzae (syn. Pyricularia oryzae), the blast disease fungus. He is interested in the phylogeny and host specificity of Magnaporthe, the genetic and molecular determinants of interactions, the diversity and population structure of the pathogen on a global scale, and the biology and genetics of sexual reproduction of M. oryzae. He developed international collaborations both in the North (Europe, USA) and in tropical areas (China, Madagascar, West Africa and Latin America).

I have a degree in Agronomy from the Federal University of Pelotas (1976), a Master’s degree in Plant Pathology from Washington State University (1982) and a PhD in Plant Pathology from Washington State University (1985). Currently, I am a Senior Scientist at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (Embrapa), where my research focuses on epidemiology, with special attention to the modeling of plant disease epidemics and the development of crop simulation models. Parallel to research, I have been involved in academic activities as a collaborating professor in graduate programs. My teaching interests include data analysis, statistical inference, and the fields of modeling and simulation.