Speakers

Prof Bill Finch-Savage FRSB

Professor Emeritus
University of Warwick
ISSS 2025 Derek Bewley Career Lecture

Biography

Bill’s career has taken place in the UK where he graduated with a BA in Biology from the University of York in 1973 and a PhD in crop physiology from the University of Reading in 1976. He joined the National Vegetable Research Station in 1981 following four years as a science manager in industry. He transferred to Horticulture Research International and then joined the University of Warwick where he became a Professor in the School of Life Sciences. Throughout he was a research leader on a series of projects to understand the process of seed germination and subsequent seedling growth to emergence from the soil in field vegetable, woodland and natural plant environments. Of particular interest was the response of seeds to environmental signals and the control of seed germination timing through dormancy. Bill is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and a past President of the International Society for Seed Science. He has recently retired but remains an Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and is developing his long-term interest in wildlife enhancement in semiurban environments.

Prof Petr Smýkal 

Professor of Botany
Palacký University Olomouc
ISSS 2025 Alfred Mayer Plenary Lecture

Biography

Studied plant biotechnology at University of Agriculture and Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague (1994) and completed doctoral studies at Charles University in Prague (1999) working on pollen embryogenesis and heat shock proteins. Being full professor at Department of Botany, Faculty of Sciences, Palacky University, Czechia.

Passionate about the domestication and genetic diversity of leguminous crops, with a focus on uncovering the genetic and biological basis of key domestication traits using primarily pea as a model system. His research includes the study of seed dormancy and pod dehiscence. Integrative approaches combining anatomy, transcriptomics and metabolomics have identified the phenylpropanoid pathway and polyphenol oxidase gene as key players in seed coat and hilum impregnation. To explore the relationship between dormancy release and environmental cues, models such as Medicago truncatula, Vicia cracca, and wild pea (P. elatius) are used in a multidisciplinary approach encompassing physiology, genomics, and geoinformatics. Additionally, wild progenitors are leveraged to enhance the genetic diversity of cultivated leguminous crops.

Dr Tina Steinbrecher 

Senior Lecturer in Seed Technology and Food Biomechanics
School of Life Sciences & the Environment, Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL)
ISSS 2025 Michael Black Founders Lecture

Biography

Dr. Tina Steinbrecher is a Senior Lecturer in Seed Technology and Food Biomechanics at the School of Life Sciences & the Environment, Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL). Tina specialises in plant biomechanics, functional morphology and seed technology, with a focus on germination, seed/fruit dispersal and dormancy mechanisms.

Tina earned her Ph.D. in Material Science from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and has held multiple postdoctoral research positions in biomimetics, biomechanics, and seed systems biology in Germany and the UK. She has led and collaborated on numerous research projects, securing funding from BBSRC, NERC, and directly from Industry. She is an author of 31 peer-reviewed publications including a Darwin Review in the Journal of Experimental Botany and a publication on mechanical dormancy in Nature Communications.

Tina holds international patents that have arisen out of her applied research, and she currently serves as Deputy Research Lead, Impact Lead and KTP Champion for Climate & Biodiversity in the Department of Biological Sciences at RHUL, supporting innovation in seed science and sustainable agriculture.

For more information, visit https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/tina-steinbrecher

Dr Karen Sommerville

Research Scientist
Australian PlantBank
ISSS 2025 Keynote Speaker

Biography

Karen Sommerville is a Research Scientist based at the Australian PlantBank, a conservation and research facility of the Botanic Gardens of Sydney. She is an active member of ISTA’s Seed Storage Committee, the Australasian Seed Banking Partnership, the Australian Network for Plant Conservation, and the Asia-Pacific Seed Preservation and Research Network. Originally trained as a horticulturist, Karen has worked in plant conservation research since 2003. She has published on a range of conservation-related topics including the ecology, genetics and reproductive biology of saltmarsh plants, seed dormancy in alpine species, cryopreservation and symbiotic germination of terrestrial orchid seeds, storage behaviour of rainforest seeds, and cryobiotechnologies for exceptional species. For the past decade, she has led research under the Rainforest Seed Conservation Project, investigating which Australian rainforest seeds are suitable for banking, assessing their longevity in storage, and developing alternative preservation methods for exceptional species. Karen and her team have amassed germination and seed trait data for over 400 rainforest species from a wide variety of families and from this have developed a simple key for assessing the likely response to desiccation when seeds are scarce or hard to germinate. Her most recent work has focussed on investigating underlying causes and alternative storage conditions for rainforest seeds found very short-lived in storage at -20°C.

Dr Roberta Dayrell

Researcher in Plant Ecology and Physiology
Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens
ISSS 2025 Keynote Speaker

Biography

Dr Roberta Dayrell is a researcher in plant ecology and physiology. She has worked at the Millennium Seed Bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the past two years and is about to begin a new role at the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions in Western Australia. Her project at Kew, funded by the UK Forestry Commission, focuses on predicting the impacts of climate change on tree seed germination timing, aiming to identify UK tree populations in which regeneration from seeds is most at risk and to guide seed sourcing for restoration. Her work also encompasses research on image-based machine learning methods for quality sorting of tree seeds. Before joining Kew, she worked at the University of Regensburg in Germany, where her research focused on developing an approach to enhance and automate the extraction of morphological seed traits, as well as on assembling a dataset of such traits for Central European species. Dr Dayrell completed her PhD in 2020 at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil and the University of Western Australia, where she examined regeneration processes in climatically buffered, infertile landscapes in both countries. In 2015, she obtained her MSc from UFMG, researching the drivers of seed dormancy and quality in tropical old-growth grasslands in Brazil.