Klaus K. Nielsen joins the DLF Group Executive Management Board

DLF has appointed Director of Research and Development Klaus K. Nielsen to Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) and member of the Group Executive Management Board.

Henceforward, the members of DLF’s Group Executive Management Board are Truels Damsgaard, CEO, Søren Halbye, CCO, Morten Andersen, CFO, Gert van Straalen, Executive Board Member, and Klaus K. Nielsen, CSO.

“We are pleased to welcome Klaus in our corporate management. I see the appointment as a natural consequence of DLF’s goal to strengthen the strategic development in our R&D activities,” states Truels Damsgaard, CEO in DLF. “In the last 10 years, Klaus has headed our international R&D network, and with his leadership and inspiration, DLF´s scientist teams have gone through a powerful development. This journey has influenced our traditional plant breeding and biotechnological development, where we, thanks to a new set of biotechnological tools, are more efficient and able to achieve faster and better results.”

Klaus (54 years old) is M.Sc. in Horticulture from 1988 and holds a Master of Science as well as a Ph.D. in molecular plant pathology from the Agricultural University of Copenhagen. Before joining DLF, he was leading Danisco’s biotechnological projects in sugar beets. In 1997, he became a part of DLF with the responsibility to lead the development of the Group’s biotechnological research in grasses.

His first project in DLF was to establish a grass biotechnology research project in cooperation with Research Center Risoe. Facilities were constructed especially for this project at Risoe and several foreign scientist were employed. At Risoe they identified the genes, and at DLF´s research station in St. Heddinge these were incorporated in the plants.

In 2006, Klaus was appointed Director of Research and Development with the responsibility of leading the DLF Group’s international R&D.

DLF has developed new biotechnological methods with marker genes and genomic selection. Today, DLF is leading within grass research with breeding and trial activities on five continents, and about every tenth of the Group’s 800 employees work in research and product development.

Klaus K. Nielsen participates actively in the political debate about research issues and through the years, he has been a member of a long list of consulting and steering committees concerning national and international research projects, among these is the Danish Bioeconomy Panel.