.:MaizeLink.org: Advisory Board:.

MaizeLink.org

International Advisory Board, CropLink Global Initiative

	Volker Brendel, Ph.D. Bergdahl Professor of Bioinformatics Iowa State University Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology and Department of Statistics

Volker Brendel is the Bergdahl Professor of Bioinformatics at Iowa State University. He received his M.Sc. degree in Applied Statistics from the University of Oxford, UK, in 1981 and his Ph.D in Life Sciences from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in 1986. Prior to joining the Iowa State University faculty in 1998, Dr. Brendel was at Stanford University, CA, as postdoctoral associate, research associate and lecturer. Dr. Brendel's research interest span molecular biology, statistical modeling, and algorithm development, with applications in the field of genome informatics. Several software applications from his group are in wide use, including programs for gene structure prediction and sequence comparisons. Recently, he has also been involved in the development and implementation of databases for genetic data, in particular maize (www.maizegdb.org) and other plants (www.plantgdb.org).

	Sue Rhee, Ph.D. Department of Plant Biology Carnegie Institution of Washington Stanford University

Dr. Sue Rhee is a Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. She received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and Ph.D. from Stanford University. From 1999-2004, she was Director of The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR). She is an expert in biological and genomics databases, gene ontologies and plant molecular genetics. She serves on the Advisory Boards of the Saccharomyces (Yeast) Genome Database, GrainGenes, Cornell Genomics Initiative, International Solanaceae Genome Initiative and ChromDB, as well as a Monitoring Editor of the journal Plant Physiology .

	Gary H. Toenniessen, Ph.D. Director for Food Security Rockefeller Foundation New York

Dr. Toenniessen is Director for Food Security and a member of the Senior Management Team at the Rockefeller Foundation. His programming responsibilities include guiding the Foundation's support of agricultural development to improve the lives and livelihoods of poor people in developing countries. He heads a team of agricultural scientists, currently based in New York and Nairobi, that works on developing more productive technologies and strengthening agricultural input and output markets, to enable smallholder farming to be more profitable. This includes support to build the agricultural research and development capacity of national institutions in developing countries and to link them to regional and international research networks. Under Dr. Toenniessen's leadership, the Foundation is now focusing much of its support for agricultural research and development on Africa, and on maintaining a strong public sector international agricultural research system, including building public-private partnerships such as AGORA. AGORA is Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA), which provides scientists in poor countries with free online access to over 750 leading journals in the field of food and agriculture. Dr. Toenniessen received his Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina and conducted postdoctoral research at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research. He has co-authored/edited four books.