Dr Peter Dodds is a Chief Scientist at CSIRO Agriculture&Food where he leads a team developing genetic tools to improve the control of important rust diseases of wheat.
Dr Dodds received a Bsc(hons) in 1991 and a PhD degree in 1996 from the University of Melbourne, Australia. After a postdoctoral stint at the USDA/UC Berkeley Plant Gene Expression Center in Albany, California he returned to Australia as an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO analysing disease resistance gene evolution and specificity in the flax rust disease system. His current research involves the identification of virulence factors from rust fungi, understanding their role in disease as well as exploiting the immune responses of the host plants for protecting wheat crops from disease though improved disease resistance breeding. He was elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2012.
[February 2020]