About

Christian Bachem was born in Mexico and educated in Sussex, UK. He received his first degree in 1980 from Bonn University in Germany where he read Agriculture, specialising in Plant Sciences. His PhD was completed at the Max Planck Institute, Cologne in 1986 in the framework of a German/Hungarian collaborative project studying Rhizobium-Legume interactions located both in Cologne and Szeged, Hungary. After post-doctorial studies into plant mitochondria (1987-1990) in Edinburgh, UK, he joined the plant biotech company Keygene (Wageningen, The Netherlands) where he was project manager for potato and developed cDNA-AFLP RNA-Fingerprinting technology. From 1994 till 2021, Christian Bachem has been teaching and conducting research at the University Wageningen, Laboratory of Plant Breeding in The Netherlands. His main scientific interest is in the structural and functional genomic analysis of potato. He also is PI in several large multipartite research projects on national, European and international level and is an active member of academic organisations such as Eucarpia, EPSO, JAPS and SOL (Co-Chair). He currently holds a position as guest scientist at WUR where he supervises 4 PhD students and two post-docs. In July 2021 he began as Program Scientist-Trait Discovery, at the potato hybrid breeding company Solynta. He also holds appointments as honorary professor at the University of London, Royal Holloway College, UK and at the Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, PRC.