Dr Benjamin Dugdale is a senior research scientist in the Banana Biotechnology Program with over 20 years’ experience in plant research. His areas of expertise range from engineered virus resistance to the development of gene editing platforms for banana improvement. Dr Dugdale has served as a senior scientist on government, grower and philanthropic funded research projects at QUT including engineered disease resistance, plant-made proteins, excision/recombination platforms in plants, gene editing and transgenesis. More recently, he has played a key role in establishing a reliable means of editing banana using CRISPR/Cas9 and developing a novel strategy for non-integrative genetic modification of the crop.