Today’s YAMMM – The British Society for Plant Pathology

Well, this is not the most egregious example of a mostly male meeting but it still has some issues: The BSPP – The British Society for Plant Pathology 2015 meeting.  Nine speakers.  Seven male.  And this in a field with plenty of excellent female researchers.

Cassava brown streak disease
(1) James Legg – IITA Tanzania
(2) Stephan Winter – Leibniz Institute DSMZ Germany
(3) Maruthi Gowda – Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich

Late blight
(1) Bill Fry – Cornell University
(2) Sophien Kamoun – Sainsbury Lab, Norwich
(3) Jonathan Jones – Sainsbury Lab, Norwich

Rice blast
(1) Sarah Gurr – University of Exeter
(2) Lauren Ryder – University of Exeter
(3) Thomas Kroj – INRA, Montpellier, France

But the weirdest part —  it says

“This year, the BSPP President, Prof. Gary Foster, has only chosen a few invited speakers on specific diseases, and wishes the remainder of the talks to be selected from offered papers.”

So does this mean Prof. Gary Foster just picked all speakers?  If so, perhaps Prof. Gary Foster needs to do a little thinking about his possible biases …

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen