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Dr Jasper Rees, Head of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC)’s newly rolled-out Biotechnology Platform, serves as a member of the ACGT Advisory Committee. He brings with him two decades of research, education and science management experience.
Dr Rees completed his undergraduate studies at Oxford University (UK) and went on to receive a DPhil in the area of human genetics there. After four years of postgraduate study in Boston,Massachusetts in the US, he returned to Oxford on a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship. It was in this capacity that he established a laboratory which he went on to run for five years.
In 1995 Dr Rees joined the University of the Western Cape (UWC) as Professor of Biochemistry, working on cancer biology and cell death mechanisms. While there he became involved in plant biotechnology – which led to his initiation of a new programme in apple genetics in collaboration with the ARC. From the work on apple genetics, has developed his current focus on next generation sequencing and high throughput genotyping technologies.
Under this programme, Dr Rees’ group used next generation sequencing technology to apply genomics technologies to a wide range of problems in plant genomics and pathology. He explains that “essentially, we were assisting the ARC with building genetics and genomics tools to benefit the breeding process”, some of which included de novo genome sequencing, transcriptome analysis and the detection of variation in the Rosaceae.
The programme continues today and has achieved a good degree of international visibility. However, according to Dr Rees, a bigger highlight of his career has been the turnaround of his Department at UWC “from being full of empty undergraduate labs to – arguably - having achieved more scholarship awards into the UK in five years, than any other department ever had in its history”.
He credits this success to the high-level recognition – both at a policy and institutional level - of the urgency of building research in previously disadvantaged institutions. He says that arriving at the institution at such a critical point in South Africa’s history allowed the freedom to implement an intensive recruitment drive. “We were able to aim for and attract high-level professorial candidates by advertising in Nature and bringing people in from overseas”.
There was also a tremendous focus on building a post-graduate culture. Dr Rees expands, “We worked to create the best career training and development for students at under-graduate level and then we identified students with the potential to get scholarships and encouraged them to apply”. A great many were successful, including one student who became the first black woman on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University.
He goes on to point out that every single student that left the country came back and all of them are currently still involved either in research or in science management. “Some of those that didn’t get scholarships also joined UWC as staff and went on to contribute even more directly to that research culture we were trying to build”, says Dr Rees.
Dr Rees moved to the ARC in May 2010. He says of his move to head up this completely new portfolio - after fifteen years of building such a significant legacy of capacity at UWC; “This gives me the opportunity to build something completely new”.
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