Professor Peter Høj Named as Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Council (June 23, 2004)

    The Minister for Education Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, yesterday announced that Peter Høj, Director of the Australian Wine Research Institute at the University of Adelaide, would take up a five year appointment as Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Council on October 1 replacing Professor Vicki Sara whose term as CEO officially ends on June 30. Until  Professor Høj takes up his post Stephen Walker will be acting director.

   
Professor Høj lists his current research interests as, "The correlation between wine composition and sensory characteristics, and identification of vineyard and winery management inputs necessary to achieve specified and objective wine sensory characteristics." According to Dr Nelson he has a MSc in biochemistry and genetics and a PhD in photosynthesis.

Professor Høj's most recent listed publication is Tattersall, et al. Resistance to an Herbivore Through Engineered Cyanogenic Glucoside Synthesis; Science 293: 1826 -1828 (2001) which records that "the entire pathway for synthesis of the tyrosine-derived cyanogenic glucoside dhurrin has been transferred from Sorghum bicolor to Arabidopsis thaliana. ...[T]he genetically engineered plants are able to synthesize and store large amounts of new natural products. The presence of dhurrin in the transgenic A. thaliana plants confers resistance to the flea beetle Phyllotreta nemorum, which is a natural pest of other members of the crucifer [cress] group, demonstrating the potential utility of cyanogenic glucosides in plant defense."

Yesterday he told The Australian's Dorothy Illing, "I would like to see the basic research as a driver of more applied research [although] I don't think we can afford to reduce our investment in basic research. But I think as a society we would be able to fund more basic research if we managed to bridge that gap between the basic research and its application for increased productivity."

He is a private member of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council, and it is noteworthy that on June 3^rd he made a submission regarding the office and role of the Chief Scientist to the Senate committee designated to examine the matter. In that submission he says:

I am a strong believer in the need for society to invest heavily in its science base in order to deliver sustainable economic growth and the benefits across all sectors of society. I am equally convinced that this burden of investment must be shared by both the private and public sector. However, the enthusiasm with which the investment is made is critically dependent on the perceived social and economic benefits that can be attributed to the investment by all stakeholders. Here it is critical that Government is the recipient of the best possible advice on how best to invest in science and equally that industry is made aware of the need to invest at a much higher rate than currently done.

While his submission, which was a defence of Dr. Batterham's ability and integrity, was not the place for him to expand on just how he would implement the balancing and augmenting of support for Australian science in general and basic research in particular -- for which the ARC is the greatest contributor -- it would be of interest were he to do so now that he has accepted the position of  CEO of the Australian Research Council.