Rudi Appels

Rudi Appels is Professor at Murdoch University in Perth in Australia. He has been at the heart and soul of the consortium since its inception in 2005. Even before then, along with Bikram Gill, he initiated discussions with interested colleagues on sequencing the wheat genome at the Winnipeg ITMI meeting in 2002 and organized, in 2003 in Washington, the first workshop designed to push forward the sequencing of the bread wheat genome.

Rudi Appels has been involved in all aspects of the IWGSC – from establishing the overall vision to delineating the steps in the roadmap that would ensure a useful sequence for breeders. He has been in the IWGSC leadership team since it started in 2005 and, in 2009, he started a project to sequence chromosome 7A using funds from Australia (GRDC, BPA), with support from Murdoch University (Australia-China Centre for Wheat Improvement).

Now, Rudi Appels is thinking beyond the reference sequence and is taking a leading role in the functional and manual annotation of the IWGSC reference sequence.

He is truly a leader in all senses of the word.