Researcher biography

Dr Barbara George-Jaeggli is a Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture & Food Innovation. She has a Master of Science degree in Biology from ETH in Zürich and a PhD in Crop Physiology from UQ. The main objective of her research is to improve the profitability and sustainability of dry-land agriculture by increasing cereal crop productivity per unit input. Dr George-Jaeggli is part of a multi-disciplinary sorghum crop improvement group based at the Hermitage Research Facility in Warwick who have assembled extensive genotyping and phenotyping resources. Sorghum is valued for its high productivity under hot and dry conditions and is an important summer grain in the broad-acre cropping regions of north-eastern Australia and a staple food crop for millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr George-Jaeggli’s team uses sorghum as a model to study the genetics and physiology of complex cereal traits, such as drought adaptation, canopy radiation use efficiency, photosynthetic capacity and yield. They have developed tools to measure these traits across thousands of field-grown breeders’ plots using proximal sensing platforms. Barbara George-Jaeggli is currently also the Centre Leader of Hermitage Research Facility.