Juniper Kiss is the newest member of the Liebe Group team, having joined in the position of Research and Development Officer in August 2022.
Hailing from the UK with a background in canola variety trials, biocontrol agent testing and plant pathology, Ms Kiss is excited to begin her journey in the Western Australian broad acre agricultural industry.
“I am fascinated by food production around the world and learning from farmers on the ground. I have a bit of an encyclopaedia in my head about all the different crop and soil management practices out there.”
Juniper has a Plant Biology undergraduate degree from Aberystwyth University (Wales) and a Masters by Research from the University of Bristol where she worked with Panama disease of bananas.
She started a PhD at the University of Southampton on food security and soil health issues in Papua New Guinea but after getting infected with malaria in the field, she started to look for jobs in Australia.
Liebe Group’s new R&D Coordinator Juniper Kiss out the front of the Liebe Group office in Dalwallinu.
“My journey to the Liebe Group has been a bit of a whirlwind”, she explained.
Whilst studying at university part-time, Juniper has worked at research institutes and agricultural NGOs full-time including at CABI (UK) on biological control testing against invasive plants and at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (Cambridge, UK) where she worked on canola, cereal, pulse and grass Distinctiveness, Uniformity, and Stability (DUS) field trials.
She managed a team of 10 technicians, monitoring and sampling over 8,000 sample plots and oversaw the image analysis of hundreds of thousands of canola cotyledons and petals.
Other work has also included research into downy mildew resistance of baby spinach at the University of Arkansas, completed the Rice: Research to Production intensive course at IRRI (Philippines) and more.
Juniper is passionate about agricultural extension and being a conduit between farmers and researchers. She is enjoys data and modelling having taught statistics to undergraduate students. Juniper has carried out all sorts of modelling in the past (spatial, economic, and mathematical) and has recently been dabbling with remote sensing in Papua New Guinea.
She is very excited to join the Liebe Group and meet all the members, farmers, industry and academic partners. With a can-do attitude, she cannot wait to get started!
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