Jari Valkonen

Click here to get the presentation (pdf)

Prof. Jari Valkonen received his MSc and Doctoral degrees in Agriculture and Forestry (MSc) with the major subject Plant Pathology from University of Helsinki, Finland. He has 20 years of experience in teaching and research in plant virology, plant pathology and plant biotechnology, of which 10 years were spent as the Professor of Virology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. His special areas of expertise are in molecular basis of virus-plant interactions and pathogen defence in plants and development of molecular tools for dissection of pathogenicity factors and analysis of defence related genes. His published work include molecular virology, plant transformations and analysis of transgenics, RNA silencing and silencing suppression, genetic diversity and detection of fungal pathogens, and the molecular characterization of putative pathogenicity factors of bacterial pathogens. He was recently employed as an Academy Professor by the Academy of Finland and is on a research leave from the chair of plant pathology at University of Helsinki. He is running a research laboratory at the Department of Applied Biology, University of Helsinki, developing high throughput molecular tools for analysis of plant-pathogen interactions and diagnosis and detection of potato pathogens and for studies associated with seed potato physiology.