2023 Organising Committee 

Deanne Brettle
BIFoR Project Officer, University of Birmingham 
I have been part of BIFoR since 2014 and have helped to organise all 6 other annual meetings! 

Dr Bruno Cintra 
Research Fellow
Geography Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham 
I am an Ecologist interested in forest dynamics, carbon and hydrological cycles and climate change. I specialise in tree rings and stable isotopes in ecological and climate reconstruction studies.

Dr Sabrine Dhaouadi 
Postdoctoral Researcher 
School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham
I work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham, aiming to study how bacteria cause disease in trees. Our project includes several approaches to be employed for the establishment of robust pathosystem models that underpin a detailed examination of infection and disease progression. This research will be applied to the main tree diseases in the UK: acute oak decline, bacterial canker of cherry and ash, bleeding canker of horse chestnut, diseases that had emerged in both UK and Europe within the last 20 years.

Dr Samantha Dobbie 
BIFoR Education and Outreach Officer 
College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham 

I support all things education, outreach and engagement related at BIFoR!

Professor Jason Hilton 
Professor of Palaeobotay and Palaeoenvironments 
School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences, University of Birmingham 
I am a research focused palaeobotanist and evolutionary plant biologist with interests in palaeoenvironments and palaeoecology. My underlying goals are to increase the quantity of paleobotanical data included into evolutionary analyses and to provide a more detailed understanding of the past environments and climates in which fossil plants lived.   

Dr Andrew Plackett 
Royal Society University Research Fello 
School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham
I am a Research Fellow tackling one of the remaining great black-boxes in plant evolution, how plants evolved seeds. To do this I am pioneering the use of functional genetic analysis in ferns, the closest seedless relatives of seed-bearing plants, to understand how genetic networks and gene functions changed during the origin of the first seeds compared to their spore-bearing ancestors.