The Physiology of Vegetable Crops

Ep Heuvelink is an associate professor with ius promovendi in the Horticulture and Product Physiology group at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), The Netherlands. He has more than 30 years of experience in scientific research and education in greenhouse crops. His expertise lies in greenhouse crop physiology and crop modelling. Core concepts in both his research and education are photosynthesis, dry matter partitioning, crop growth and development (especially flowering and fruit set). Crop simulation models are central in his analytical, quantitative thinking about crop growth, and a powerful tool to integrate and extrapolate knowledge. He has supervised over 120 MSc thesis students and is co-promotor of 40 PhD students. Ep is frequently invited as a keynote speaker at international symposia and teaches advanced intensive courses on greenhouse production, crop physiology and crop modelling around the world. He is also a teacher in the Wageningen Summer school on Greenhouse Horticulture and has (co-)authored more than 150 papers in refereed scientific journals, 200 papers in professional journals and has authored three books and edited another three. Ep is listed in the Stanford/Elsevier world’s top 2% scientists list and ranked 32 in list of best Wageningen scientists in the field of agriculture and plant sciences. Haim obtained his academic education in plant physiology and genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked as a Postdoctoral Scientist at The John Innes Institute (Norwich England) and at the Wageningen Agricultural University (Holland) before recruited as a staff member at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He spent three sabbaticals at Duke University Medical Centre, Department of Biochemistry. In addition to research, teaching, and supervision, Haim served as elected Head of the Department of Field and Vegetable Crops, elected Head of Faculty Research Committee, elected Faculty Dean and elected University Rector. His research interests include physiology of vegetable crops with special emphasis on flowering, setting and seed production; Physiology and potato breeding. Haim shared the idea and actual introduction of genes for long keeping in tomatoes, the development and introduction of cherry tomatoes as a standard commodity, and later that of cluster tomatoes. He headed a leading ream of plant breeders and released more than a hundred salad and cherry tomato hybrids, as well as short-day onion hybrids, short day seed propagated shallot hybrids, and currently he jointly leads a large-scale garlic breeding program aiming at seed propagated hybrid garlic. He supervised about 80 graduate students, published about 150 scientific papers, chapters in books and edited books on alliums.