Prof. Meixue Zhou

Prof. Meixue Zhou is a professor at the Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture, University of Tasmania. He started his career as a barley/wheat breeder in the 1990s in China. He commenced his research career in Australia in 1999 after he finished his PhD studies at Charles Sturt University. He commenced working at the University of Tasmania as a Junior Research Fellow (Level A) in 1999, was promoted to Research Fellow in 2002, Senior Research Fellow in 2006, Associate Professor in 2010, and finally to a full professorship in 2018. During this period, he successfully expanded the Tasmanian research program from a purely breeding program to a broad range of germplasm development and other applied research programs. His research has been focusing on the discovery of new mechanisms for plants to deal with different stresses (most of which are caused by climate changes; for example, waterlogging, acidic soils, and salinity), developing new breeding technologies, identifying key genes and germplasms for plant stress tolerance and integrating them to produce high-yielding commercial barley varieties. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed journal papers, which have appeared in prestigious journals such as Nature Communication, PNAS, and Plant Biotechnology Journal. He is one of the few researchers who have successfully transformed research outcomes to producing new crop varieties, thus having a direct impact on crop production.