Bartholomeus Panis

Bart Panis is currently principal scientists dealing with Biodiversity for Food & Agriculture and Banana Genebank Manager for the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.

He obtained his PhD in 1995 at the University Leuven, Belgium, where he was involved in cryopreservation and the development of embryogenic cell suspensions, protoplast culture and techniques for genetic engineering of banana. As postdoctoral researcher and later on as research manager, he co-ordinated different international projects dealing with plant biotechnology and cryopreservation.

In 2013, he started working for Bioversity International and developed the world’s largest banana cryobank. A major achievement is the development of a novel plant cryopreservation protocol (i.e. droplet-vitrification), that was later on applied to meristems, calli, somatic and zygotic embryos of more than 50 plant species.

In 2016, he started to work on the establishment of tissue culture and cryopreservation protocols for coconut which lead to a novel and patented technology for axillary shoot multiplication for coconut palms. Additionally, he is involved in projects dealing with conservation of wild bananas and gene editing.

Bart Panis is currently member of the editorial board of CryoLetters and Associate Editor of Plant Cell Tissue and Organ Culture and was involved in the organization of about 50 international Symposia and workshops. He trained more than 150 researchers from all parts of the world on plant tissue culture and cryopreservation, guided 34 PhD and 82 Master theses. He is council member for Belgium of the ISHS (International Society for Horticultural Science), co-Chair of the ECPGR working groups on cryopreservation and MC member of the EU COST action, COPYTREE. His research was written down in more than 400 contributions, resulting in an h-index of 33.