George Coupland

George Coupland is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Cologne, Germany. He studied Microbiology at the University of Glasgow and in 1984 received a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Edinburgh. He then worked with Peter Starlinger at the University of Cologne as a Royal Society Exchange Fellow and an EMBO long-term fellow studying the function of maize transposable elements in transgenic tobacco plants. From 1989, he led a research group at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, and established a programme using genetic approaches in Arabidopsis to define the mechanisms controlling floral induction in response to environmental cues. He was appointed to his present position in 2001. In particular, his work has elucidated a pathway that confers a flowering response to seasonal changes in day length and proposed how this pathway is controlled by a combination of circadian clock control and light signaling. Recently he has extended the analysis of this response to other species, and to the study of flowering control in perennial plants. He was elected a member of EMBO in 2001.

This page last modified on February 19, 2006