User:Kipepea/Beat Keller

Beat Keller (born 14 September 1958 in Interlaken) is a Swiss molecular biologist and professor for Molecular Biology of Plants at the University of Zürich. He is well known for his research on disease resistance in cereals.

Biography
Keller studied biology at the University of Basel from 1978 until 1982. After he had finished his dissertation on the topic of "Form-determining proteins in Enterobacteria phage T4 head assembly: The role of gene products 67 and 68" in 1985, he started his postdoctoral fellowship at the Biocenter of the University of Basel. In 1986 he continued his training to become a molecular biologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, where he conducted research in the group of Plant Biology of Christopher John Lamb. In 1989 Keller returned to Switzerland and set up a research group in Plant Biotechnology at the Swiss Federal Research Station for Agronomy (now Agroscope). The group, which has been focussing on cereal genetics, disease resistance and molecular markers was lead by Keller until 1997. In 1995, Keller qualified as professor at the ETH Zürich and followed a call to become a full professor for Plant Biology at the University of Zürich in 1997. From 1998 until 2014 he was Director of the Institute of Plant Biology at the University of Zürich, from 2004 until 2006 he was Head of the Department of Biology.

Currently, Keller is Head of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology of the University of Zürich and Co-Director of the of the Research Focus Programme "Evolution in Action".

Awards
For his research, Beat Kellers has been receiving an Advanced Investigator Grant by the European Research Council from 2010 until 2015. Furthermore he got elected as member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation in 2014.

Memberships in scientific organizations
Keller's research work is connected with various memberships in national and international scientific organizations like for example the Union of the Swiss Societies for Experimental Biology (USGEB), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (USA), the American Association for Plant Biology (USA), the American Society of Phytopathology (USA) and the International Society of Plant Microbe Interactions. As a scientific advisory board member he devoted his expertise in the „State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering“ of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2001-2005) and the John Innes Centre (2011-2013).

Currently, Keller is member of the scientific Advisory Boards of the German Plant Genome Programme GABI, Plants for the Future (after 2003), the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (after 2009). Furthermore, since 2009 Keller has been member of the Leadership Team of the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium.

Publications

 * List of publications, Research Gate