Notes from IUFRO Kuala Lumpur 2010

Bukit Melawati lighthouse, Kuala Selangor (In-conference tour)
I'm back from IUFRO Kuala Lumpur 2010 conference. It's a blast thanks to the committee members for their hard work (including myself :p). Just wanna post some short notes I gathered.

The conference opened with a keynote by Dato Freezailah who is the chairman of Malaysia Timber Certification Council. One of the interesting topics during the first day is about timber tracking. On the second day, Prof. David Neale presented a paper on adaptive and conservation genetics. I was truly captivated by his slides on the history of forest genomic approaches the past 20-30 years. I wasn't even born, imagine that!

On the 3rd day, tree genomics and bioinformatics workshop was held. Prof. Carl Douglas gave us a wonderful start on Popular genomics. It's amazing how many participants showed up for that session. The participants were eager to learn about Next Generation Sequencing and how to apply them in genomics, adaptive genetics and conservation. I presented during the workshop and got some good feedback from the audience. :-) Well, I could have done better.

The next IUFRO conference will be held in Florence, Italy and scheduled to be August 2011. The following conference will be in Kyoto, 2012. It's gonna be exciting!

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Forest research in Malaysia: an overseas experience

As I was browsing through my old posts to check for any comments when I was abroad, I found a statement that said "forest biotechnology is less developed in Malaysia". Sadly I have to agree. During my travels, I met some international experts in forest research. Most of the things they said surprised me. Good or bad.

Malaysia is rich. We have a lot of money to do research and conservation. Obviously we don't think so. Indonesia has less funding to do research but Indonesians are keen to protect their forests. We should learn from our neighbour.

Grant application for forestry research can be a bit complicated because it's neither categorised under agriculture nor science & technology. Forestry is not listed under MOSTI grants. Recently, it's included in MOA fund.

Lack of funding for forest research happens not only in Malaysia. I recently met a senior researcher from Singapore. Little did I know he studied the same species a few years ago. They had the same problem.

When I was attached in China, I noticed that students there are more eager to seek knowledge. Not just "get things done" attitude". They took initiatives to organize plant identification class every week. They paid visits to the nearby forest reserves accompanied by a teacher/researcher who will explain the plant name etc.

A visiting professor from UK once said to the class that we all have a brain, everybody has the same brain, we can be smarter than other people. Don't underestimate yourself.

Forest is our future. So start planting our future!

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