BioConsortia appoints Dr. Andrew Jacobs as lead R&D team in New Zealand

BioConsortia, Inc., the innovative ag biotech company with the proprietary Advanced Microbial Selection (AMS) process for improving plant traits and increasing crop yields, has appointed Dr. Andrew Jacobs as Head of R&D for its operation in Auckland, New Zealand. He will report to Dr. Susan Turner, SVP R&D for BioConsortia.

Jacobs joins BioConsortia with an extensive history of research management. Most recently he held the position of Manager of Corporate Projects at ITEK Ventures Pty Ltd, an independent technology commercialization company associated with the University of South Australia. In this role he was able to apply corporate research management experience towards the university start-ups being funded and commercialized by ITEK.

During his tenure with ITEK, Jacobs was managing a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) and Dow AgroSciences. He had been a Research Fellow at ACPFG since 2003, and was concurrently an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Adelaide in Australia. His research has focused on abiotic stress tolerance in cereals, aligning well with the current targets for BioConsortia.

Jacobs completed his PhD at the University of Adelaide with six months spent in Germany at The Max-Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. His PhD work culminated in the isolation of a novel gene for the formation of callose, leading to publication of the research in The Plant Cell. Since then Jacobs has published a number of other papers in the field of plant molecular and microbial science, has been invited to speak at international conferences as an expert, and holds two patents for plant systems.