Curriculum

Riccardo Velasco obtained a M.Sc. degree in Agricultural Science at Florence University (Italy) in 1989 and a PhD in Plant Molecular Biology at Koln University (Germany) in 1995. He is currently the head of the Department of Genomics and Crop Biology at the Foundation E. Mach, where he serves as Senior Scientist since 1999, helding the role of head of department since 2005. Prior to the current position, he was leading two Genome Projects, on grape and apple, and the relative breeding programs. More recently he has also contributed to analyse the strawberry, pear, olive and raspberry genomes. Dr. Velasco has 25 years-experience in crop breeding and genomics in cereals and fruit trees and is currently leading the molecular breeding on fruit trees of the Fondazione Mach and the high throughput genotyping platform. Since a couple of years his department is deeply involved in applications of CRISPR/Cas9 in fruit trees mutagenesis. He has published over 130 refereed articles (personal hi=37) and book chapters on genetics, genomics, molecular breeding and molecular biology.