Farrer Memorial Medal Winner - Dr Tony Fischer.

Honouring great science from Farrer to the future

Reference: 07/147

The 2007 Farrer Memorial Medal, which honours distinguished service in Australian agricultural science, will be presented to CSIRO Plant Industry Honorary Fellow, Dr Tony Fischer, at a ceremony at CSIRO’s Discovery Centre in Canberra today.

• 14 August 2007

At the ceremony Dr Fischer will give the 2007 Farrer Oration; “Improvement in Wheat Yield: Farrer, Physiology and Functional Genomics”, which will discuss the past successes of Australian wheat breeding and the challenges of the future.

“Dr Fischer is well known internationally as a wheat cropping scientist,” says CSIRO Plant Industry Chief, Dr Jeremy Burdon.

“He is rightly recognised as a pre-eminent Australian crop physiologist who has made an outstanding contribution to agricultural research in Australia, particularly here at CSIRO Plant Industry, as Director of the Wheat Program at the International Centre for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (CIMMYT) in Mexico, as an influential research manager at the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and now again as an Honorary Fellow with CSIRO Plant Industry.” 

Dr Fischer has published more than 120 scientific publications, including several papers drawing on data from his own property in southern NSW where he kept crop, soil and climatic records for more than 40 years.

The Farrer Memorial Trust was established in 1911 to perpetuate the memory of William James Farrer, whose pioneering wheat breeding efforts laid the foundations of Australia’s largest agricultural export industry.

The Farrer medallist is chosen by Trustees of the Farrer Memorial Research Scholarship Fund from the ranks of those persons who have rendered distinguished service in agricultural science in Australia in the fields of research, education or administration.

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