Roger Hellens

Roger Hellens is a life scientist with over 35 years of experience leading and conducting industry-oriented research in molecular biology, bioinformatics, genetics, cell biology and breeding.Roger joined the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre (KBC) as Chief Technology Officer and leads the adaptation, adoption, and implementation of tools and technologies to accelerate the discovery of new kiwifruit varieties. From 2019 to 2022, roger was the General Manager – Forest to Timber Products at Scion, New Zealand Institute for Forestry, where he helped establish New Zealand Timber Design Centre. In 2014, Roger joined The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and the Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities. He held several leadership positions as an Agricultural Biotechnology Professor and the Institute for Future Environments (IFE) Deputy Executive Director at QUT. He also helped establish Australia’s National tree genomics program. From 2000 to 2014, Roger worked for the New Zealand government research institute Plant & Food Research (formerly HortResearch), where he held several senior roles, including leading the institute’s 80-person genomics research program and, more recently, its $10M p.a. kiwifruit breeding research program. Roger’s research interests at Plant & Food Research included developing red-fleshed apple and kiwifruit varieties and exploiting Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques. He also maintained a keen interest in post-transcriptional gene regulation, which has become relevant in understanding the role upstream open reading frames (uORF) play in regulating vitamin C. This has now led to him co-founding genXtraits (www.genXtraits.com). Before moving to New Zealand, Roger worked at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, where he developed the first genetic maps of peas (including his PhD on the molecular basis of Mendel’s white flower phenotype). He also developed the pGreen plant transformation vector and studied gene silencing (RNAi) in petunia. Roger received a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the University of East Anglia in 1995 and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Liverpool in 1989.