Jasper Rees was a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, and then Professor of Biochemistry at the University of the Western Cape from 1995. During the following 15 years, he played an important role in Building one of the largest Biotechnology Departments in South Africa. In 2010, Rees moved to the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in Pretoria, as the Head of the ARC Biotechnology Platform, where he was responsible for the Establishment of advanced facilities for genomics and bioinformatics, and their application in plant genomics and molecular pathology on wheat, sorghum, maize, apples, sweet potato and cassava. In 2014 he was appointed as the Group Executive for Research and Innovation Systems at the ARC, where he was responsible for biotechnology, engineering, natural resource management and informatics. Rees has joined the Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BUAN) as its first Vice-Chancellor. The mandate of the University is now to develop and broaden its focus to cover agriculture and the natural environment, and this will provide the basis for the development of the Bioeconomy.
