The Driving Force at Ag RD&IP Consult
Jorge Mayer, Director at Ag RD&IP Consult, brings to the table a long track recordin agricultural research, R&D and IP management, and international technology transfer.
View Jorge Mayer's Linkedin profileJorge was born and grew up in Peru. But after having lived in Austria, Germany, Colombia, and Australia, and having worked on numerous agricultural R&D projects of global resonance, he is well placed to apply his experiences to assist others achieve impact in agriculture.
After obtaining a PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Innsbruck-Austria, he did a postdoc at the Max Planck-Institute for Plant Breeding Research with the group of Jeff Schell, where some of the first transgenic plants in the world were being obtained at the time.
After three years as assistant professor at the Botanic Institute of the RWTH Aachen, Germany, searching for rust resistance genes in wheat, he joined the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), in Cali-Colombia, as a senior staff of the Biotechnology Research Unit, where he spent five years providing molecular biochemical support to the pathology, physiology, entomology and microbiology sections of the cassava, beans, and pastures research programs.
He spent three more years in Colombia as a Molecular Biochemist at AgrEvo AgroBiologicals (now Bayer Crop Science), where he worked on the molecular characterization of entomopathogenic fungi used for the biological control of coffee berry borer and whiteflies.
In 1998 he joined the Center for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA), in Canberra-Australia, as a Principal Scientist, IP Analyst and Operations Manager. Part of his research was dedicated to finding beta-glucuronidases with novel enzymatic properties from various sources.
At this stage and due to his involvement with freedom-to-operate analysis and technology transfer, Jorge obtained a Master of Industrial Property degree at the Law Faculty of the University of Technology, Sydney.
In 2004, Jorge became Manager of the Golden Rice Humanitarian Project, based in Freiburg-Germany, where he also managed the international ProVitaMinRice Consortium, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded project aimed at increasing the biofortification properties of Golden Rice.
From 2008 to 2015, Jorge worked sequentially as the Program Manager for Germplasm Enhancement, Yield and Quality Traits, and finally Yield Traits at the Grains Research & Development Corporation of Australia (GRDC), until he finally became an independent consultant for international agricultural R&D and technology transfer.