Photo Shutterstock It is considered the holy grail of plant sciences: how to improve photosynthesis so that plants grow faster. And, will this enable us to develop food crops to sustainably feed the world population? A new WUR institute will work on this issue over the next ten years, with a considerable sum of seed capital.
The provisional name for the new institute is Institute for Advanced Studies for Photosynthetic Efficiency (IASPE). It is a collaboration between WUR and the Photosynthesis 2.0 Research Fund (P2RF), a fund that was initiated by Egbert van der Pol, Menno Witteveen and Maarten Koopman. P2RF is to contribute 50 million euros to the project. WUR adds a further 12 million, mainly in the form of personnel and lab spaces for a reduced fee.
World of banking
The mega-collaboration was announced yesterday during the 104th Dies Natalis, WUR’s birthday. Witteveen and Koopman come from the world of banking. They founded the investment company Koopman & Witteveen in 1989. They work together within DIF Capital Partners, which they founded in 2005. The third partner, Van der Pol, is a retired investor and former real estate developer (Provast). He studied biology in Leiden.
The new institute is to bring forth thirty PhDs and sixty postdocs over the coming years. The institute will be established on the campus, but the exact location is not yet known.
