There’s been lots of excitement in the Functional Grains Centre in the last few months as we move towards the final stages of our Centre. Our team has continued to engage with industry and scientists in Australia and around the world. Based on PhD student Nancy’ Saji’s social media posts she had an amazing experience learning about rice production in the Philippines. We were also delighted to hear the news that PhD student Rachael Wood is this year’s recipient of the Farrer Memorial Trust Travelling Scholarship.

The FGC team have embarked on other adventures in recent months with their attendance at both the Summer Grains Conference and the Australasian Grain Science Association (AGSA) conference, you can read more later in the newsletter. The Summer Grains conference provided an opportunity for the team to learn more about the production side of the industry. Congratulations to PhD Rachael Wood and Honours student Borkwei Ed Nignpense on their winning posters. While in Queensland we also took the opportunity to engage our friends from Team Building Australia to run some activities. It was great to see how our team members performed under pressure to solve complex problems. FGC team members also had the opportunity to develop their media skills through our new initiative “FGC TV” which we introduced at this year’s AGSA conference. FGC team members were tasked with interviewing presenters and posting these videos on social media. Clearly, we have some budding journalists in the FGC.

The FGC continues to welcome visiting scientists. We recently had the pleasure of having PhD student Alba Lucia visit from Mexico to work on antioxidant properties of proteins. We currently have Simon Xu visiting from Shenyang Agricultural University in China for 12 months. Simon will be working on the characterisation of sorghum starch and proteins.  We will soon also welcome PhD student Marina Manini who will be visiting from Argentina to study the phenolic composition of ancient grains.

In recent weeks we have welcomed two new PhD students, Allister Clarke and Aduba Jok, and Honours student Raiyan Mahbub. As you will read later in the newsletter, Allister’s scholarship is funded by the Food Agility CRC and he will be working on ways to predict rice quality using machine learning. Aduba has received a Charles Sturt University PhD Scholarship and will work on anti-cancer properties of sorghum extracts, while Raiyan’s research on the anti-inflammatory properties of coloured rice extracts is supported by a scholarship from the Graham Centre for Agricultural Innovation.

It has been exciting to see a number of our PhD students submit their theses recently. Esther Callcott, Rachael Wood and Shiwangni Rao have all submitted their thesis for examination. We have also had examiner responses back for Chris Florides and Neeta Karve who have both received pass recommendations subject to some reviews.  Hopefully there will be a good representation of FGC graduates at graduation ceremonies in December.

Professor Chris Blanchard

photo caption: The FGC team at the Australian Summer Grains Conference