Anthony Brown, CSIRO Plant Industry, Australia
Tony Brown, received his Agricultural Science degree (Honours 1) from University of Sydney, Australia in 1963. His first employment was with Colonial Sugar Company, stationed at Lautoka, Fiji as technical field officer working on the breeding and quantitative genetics of sugarcane. In 1966 he began his PhD in Genetics with Professor R W Allard, at University of California, Davis. Upon completion in 1969, he took up a Lectureship in Biology, University of York, England. He returned to Australia in 1972 to join CSIRO. In November 2006, he retired as a Chief Research Scientist in the Centre for Plant Biodiversity Research, CSIRO Plant Industry, Canberra, but continues there as Honorary Research Fellow, in the Division's programs on the Systematics, Evolution and Conservation Biology of the Australian Flora. His research has been in the fields of plant population genetics, plant breeding, conservation genetics, evolution and molecular systematics. He has authored singly or jointly over 200 research papers and reviews, and one monograph (with OH Frankel and JJ Burdon) "The Conservation of Plant Biodiversity" and help edited five volumes. He has participated in plant collecting missions for wild relatives of crops, two for wild barley (Israel, Iran) and six for wild Glycine and Gossypium in many regions of Australia. He was curator of the Australian Plant Genetics Resources Centre for Indigenous wild relatives of crops. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow of Bioversity International, Rome, Italy and Technical Advisor on their global project developing the scientific basis of In Situ conservation on-farm.