Title 1: Employing Powdery Mildew Resistance Genes for Wheat Improvement
Speaker：Dr. Pengtao Ma
Title 2: Genetic Analysis for Endosperm Modification in Quality Protein Maize
Speaker： Dr. Hongjun Liu
Time: 3:00-6:00 pm  June 15th 2016 (Wednesday) 
Venue： Meeting Room 203, College of Agronomy
Speaker Profile :
Pengtao Ma, Postdoctor of Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Winner of Outstanding young science foundation of Hebei Province. Dr. Ma graduated from the Agricultural Resources Research Center, IGDB, CAS in 2014, and now is a postdoctor in IGDB, CAS. He mainly focuses on exploring, mapping and cloning wheat powdery mildew resistance genes and uses them in molecular design breeding. Up to now, Dr Ma has published 16 papers, and of which six papers were published on the famous SCI journals in agronomy field as the first author, such as Theoretical and Applied Genetics, Plant disease, Molecular Breeding, Frontiers in Plant science, etc. Meanwhile, Dr Ma is hosting four projects funded by Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), general (first-class) and special fundings of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation and Outstanding young science foundation of Hebei Province.
Hongjun Liu, Post-doc at the institute of Plant Physiology& Ecology, SIBS, CAS. He received his Bachelor and Master degree from Northeast Agricultural University in 2005 and 2008, and received his PhD degree at Sichuan Agricultural University in 2013, after that he worked as post-doctoral fellow at the institute of Plant Physiology& Ecology, SIBS, CAS. 
Maize is one of the most productive cereal crops in the world in respect to yield per acreage. Grain hardness is a key agronomic trait in maize since it provides resistance to damage during harvesting and marketing as well as to insect and fungal damage. Dr. Hongjun Liu’s research is focus on using genetic, biochemical and molecular approaches to study the maize endosperm development, especially at its late stage, during which its storage products, like zein proteins, are synthesized to fill the grain. So far, he has published 10 research papers on PNAS, BMC genomics, PLoS ONEwith 5 papers as first author, 1 paper as co-first author, and 4 papers as co-author. The total SCI-impact factor is 27.

College of Agronomy(Academy of Agricultural Sciences)
June 13th 2016