IAPPS Board Member – Dr. Frank Ordon

Biography

Prof. Dr. Frank Ordon is President of the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI, https://www.julius-kuehn.de), the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants in Germany, and honorary professor for “Molecular Resistance Breeding” at the Martin-Luther-University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. He studied agricultural sciences at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, where he also got his PhD in 1992 and state doctorate (Dr. habil.) in 1998.

From 2002 to 2008 he was head of the Institute for Epidemiology and Resistance Resources of the Federal Centre for Breeding Research on Cultivated Plants and since the founding of the JKI in 2008 until 2020 he was head of the Institute for Resistance Research and Stress Tolerance of JKI.

He is editor-in-chief of “Plant Breeding” and is member of several editorial boards and national and international scientific advisory boards. Besides this, he is chair of the Research Committee of the Wheat Initiative since 2014 and member of the IAPPS Board since 2019.

Frank has a basic background in classical and molecular plant breeding with special emphasis on breeding research for resistance against viral and fungal pathogens in major crop plants especially barley and wheat. His primary contribution includes the identification of resistance to biotic and abiotic stress in genetic resources followed by genetic analyses and the development of molecular markers for major resistance genes and QTL up to gene isolation.

Frank has published the results of his studies in more than 190 papers in peer-reviewed journals.