Calendar Name: seminars Scheduled for: Thursday, October 3 2013, 14:00 - 15:30 Event text: Korneel Vandenbroucke Bayer CropScience Gent Belgium Details: POSTDOC INNOVATION SEMINAR �Inside Bayer CropScience: �To Propel Farming�s Future� ABSTRACT At Bayer CropScience, everything starts with local insight. We dig deep into the specific issues farmers face. What�s keeping them awake at night? Is it a new pest or government regulations? Poor soil or lack of water? The opportunities and challenges driving the global agricultural community are as fascinating as they are daunting. A rapidly growing world population increases global demand for food, fiber as well as renewable raw materials. Changes in our climate threaten harvests and impact yields. Improving our living standard worldwide comes with an ever increasing demand for high-quality, healthy and affordable food. Such challenges require sophisticated answers. Our corporate promise �Bayer: Science for a Better Life� is the foundation of what we at Bayer CropScience strive to achieve within the agricultural industry. We have extraordinary expertise, the passion and integrity of farmers, the willingness to listen closely to our customers� needs across the globe, and the vision to foresee issues and seize opportunities across the entire value chain. At Bayer CropScience, we foster an environment of collaboration across different disciplines at the intersection of chemistry and biology, as well as across cultures and markets. Every day, we bring together expertise in seeds, breeding, crop protection biologics and chemistry as well as environmental science solutions. We aim to create the products and services to solve some of the key challenges in agriculture. But even as an industry leader, we will not be able to solve agriculture�s challenges alone. Game-changing ideas need diversity in experience, expertise and perspective to evolve, mature and become reality. Part of our quest therefore is to look ahead and beyond the current solutions and existing partnerships towards even broader initiatives. Our objective is to go beyond products, technologies, and work with others to trigger great ideas. Our combined R&D organization unites three areas: Small Molecules, Biologics and Seeds � all cooperating to build a unique position in plant health research. Our seeds business unites the expertise of plant physiologists and geneticists, of molecular and cellular biologists, of bioinformaticians and breeding experts. The main purpose of Seeds Research, located at innovation centra in RTP and Ghent, is to discover new traits and bring them to proof-of-concept. Our most important crops are soybeans, wheat, cotton, oilseed rape, corn and rice. The trait focus is on herbicide tolerance, insect control, yield enhancement and drought tolerance. Furthermore, our work on non-GM Traits supports the development of crop varieties that match the requirements of the relevant markets perfectly.