Dr Julia Bally is currently employed as a Research Fellow in the Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities (CTCB), at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

She has completed her PhD in Biological science in 2008 at Bayer Cropscience, in collaboration with the CNRS-University of Lyon (France), studying recombinant protein expression and folding in chloroplasts. After a first post-doc on rhizobium-legume symbiosis, nitrogen fixation, still at Bayer Cropscience, she joined Peter Waterhouse’s team at the University of Sydney in 2011 with an ARC Super Science Fellowship. She spent her fellowship working on the model plant Nicotiana benthamiana and developing an extreme gene expression system as a platform for industrial plant-biotechnology, with a particular interest for research on gene silencing and RNAi. She subsequently joined the CTCB in 2014 to continue her research in Peter Waterhouse’s team and work on projects, developed in collaboration with Corteva Agriscience, focusing on trans-kingdom RNAi and plant protection against agricultural pests.