Academic and Professional Background

• Background:

  Post-doctoral Fellow

• Personal Resume:

  Dr. Jessica Dohmen-Vereijssen's research aim is to determine the likely ecophysiological responses of New Zealand’s weevil pests and their parasitoids to changes to its pasture agroecosystems. She is investigating the significant mortality and sterility that the parasitoid Microctonus hyperodae can cause in the Argentine stem weevil. Second part of the project focuses on population dynamics analysis of the Argentine stem weevil. Third part of her research is to understand the reproductive/flight trade-offs in the clover root weevil that occur as a result of factors such as photoperiod, temperature, irrigation, crowding and food quality.

  She is a broadly-trained plant protection specialist with an MSc in 'Plant Breeding and Crop Protection' from Wageningen University (The Netherlands), where she specialised in applied entomology and plant pathology. During her PhD at Wageningen University, conducted at the Institute of Sugar Beet Research in the Netherlands, she studied the epidemiology and life cycle of the fungus Cercospora beticola in sugar beet with a view to improving disease management. She continued to work there on the control of foliar pathogens and aerial insects till early 2006. After long-term travelling in Asia and India she arrived in New Zealand where she worked as a Fund Portfolio Manager at AgResearch before starting her AGMARDT-funded Post-doctoral Fellowship at Lincoln University with Stephen Goldson, Karen Armstrong and Allan Crawford.