Center Directors General

Emile Frison became director general of Bioversity International in 2003. Emile stresses the importance of using agricultural biodiversity to improve the lives of smallholder farmers in developing countries. He has spent most of his career in international agricultural research and 18 years working on plant genetic resources.

Emile joined the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, since renamed Bioversity International, in 1987, to coordinate research on plant health in plant collections. In 1992, as regional director for Europe, he initiated a new phase of the European Cooperative Programme for Crop Genetic Resources Networks.

As director of the Bioversity International Network for Improvement of Banana and Plantain, Emile promoted research on this neglected crop, the tropical world’s fourth most important staple food. In 2002 he launched a global consortium of 27 members in 14 countries to decode genetic information in banana.

Emile has an MSc in plant pathology from the Catholic University of Louvain and a PhD from the University of Gembloux in Belgium. In October 2007 Emile was nominated Extraordinary Professor at the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Catholic University of Louvain. He has served on the International Advisory Council of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Since March 2009 he has been a member of the executive board of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.