Jonathan D.G. Jones

Prof. Jonathan D G Jones FRS is a leading researcher in plant/microbe interactions. He graduated in Botany from the Cambridge Natural Sciences tripos (1976) and completed his Ph.D. on cereal chromosomes supervised by Dick Flavell at the Plant Breeding Institute, Trumpington, in 1980. Dr. Jones was a postdoctoral fellow with Fred Ausubel at Harvard University in 1981 and 1982, working on symbiotic nitrogen fixation. From 1983-1988, he worked in the private sector at a startup agbiotech company (Advanced Genetic Sciences, Oakland, California) founded to exploit new developments in molecular biology for crop improvement. In 1988, he moved to the UK to be one of the first recruits at The Sainsbury Laboratory, Norwich. He has published landmark papers on plant resistance genes and mechanisms, and on investigating the effector complements of the oomycete pathogens Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis and Albugo candida using next-generation sequencing methods. He also pioneers innovative methods to accelerate cloning and deployment of novel genes for resistance to , the potato late blight pathogen. Dr. Jones has co-founded 2 companies; Mendel Biotechnology, founded in 1997 to carry out genomics experiments to discover and exploit key regulators of crop productivity, and Norfolk Plant Sciences Ltd, to combine health promoting traits and disease resistance traits in potato and tomato. Dr. Jones was elected a Professor at the University of East Anglia in 1997, a member of EMBO in 1998, Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015. He has participated in several Royal Society working groups on food security.