Adrian
Gibbs lives in Canberra, and enjoys an active retirement
chasing balloons (with wife Pat), learning more biology,
promoting science, gardening in a sustainable way, and enjoying
grandparenthood.
His 39-year career at ANU (John Curtin School of Medical
Research 1966-1970; Research School of Biological Sciences
1971-1999; School of Botany and Zoology 2000-2005) was
busy and resulted in au thorship/co- au thorship of over
250 publications; mostly research papers but also books
and networked publications, including an introductory book
on plant virology that was translated into both Russian
and Mandarin Chinese.
Throughout his career he has worked to understand the
origins and evolution of viruses. This has involved understanding
their identification, ecology and host interactions. He
pioneered the storage and manipulation of virus data, first
as co-founder of the Descriptions of Plant Viruses, then,
using computers, founded the Virus Identification and Data
Exchange ( VIDE ) database, which became the first component
of the database of the International Committee on Taxonomy
of Viruses (ICTVdB).
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He
was an undergraduate at Imperial College London (1stClass
Honours Botany 1956; Forbes Memorial Medallist) and Ph.D.
(London) 1961. First he worked at the world's oldest agricultural
research station, Rothamsted Experimental Station in the
UK, with Fred Bawden as his mentor, then the JCSMR under
Frank Fenner. Virus research was only broken by appropriately
assisting in university and science administration, and advisory
appointments to agencies such as the Australian Quarantine
and Inspection Service, the Australian Genomic Information
Centre (Universityof Sydney), CAB International.
Adrian Gibbs was elected a Fellow of theAustralian Academy
of Science in 1993.
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