Brown, Anthony Hugh Dean (Tony)   (1941 -  )

Born on November 25, 1941, in Waverley, Sydney, NSW.

In high school Tony was inspired to seek a research career as an agricultural chemist after watching a film made by CSIRO on how the discovery of remedying trace element deficiencies in some depleted soils of South Australia converted them to cropping.

He enrolled in the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Sydney, as a salaried employee of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.

On graduating (in 1963), Tony was assigned by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company to its sugarcane experiment station in Lautoka, Fiji.

After nearly four years in Fiji, Tony returned in 1966 to academia and graduate school. He chose to work with Dr. Robert W. Allard at the University of California, Davis. The PhD project was on isozyme variation in Zea mays.

With the completion of his PhD in 1969, Tony was appointed as a lecturer in Biology at the University of York, England.

After three years, Tony returned to Australia to CSIRO Plant Industry as a research scientist in Canberra in 1972.

Tony's first real germplasm collecting mission was an object lesson in adjusting theory to field reality. This was a frenetic mission to Iran with Israeli professors Dani Zohary and Eibi Nevo. The trip went from Mehran near the border with Iraq, across the Zagros Mountains and the southern Caspian shores to Gonbad-e-Qabus, just two years before the 1979 revolution. The target of the trip was wild cereals, particularly wild barley, the diversity being grown by farmers in the many barley fields was inspiring.

His research ultimately led to Tony's principal commitment as Honorary Research Fellow with the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute in their project on the significance of crop genetic diversity still present on farms in traditional agroecosystems.

Tony's passion for conservation genetics, from his formative years with sugarcane to the present with Glycine species, his diligent research at CSIRO, and his affiliation with the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (now Bioversity International), Rome, Italy, are evident in his many contributions.

CSIRO Plant Industry as his home base was an excellent and supportive research environment, where Tony worked jointly with many outstanding colleagues, including Drs. Jeremy Burdon, Curt Brubaker, Andrew Young, Jake Jacobsen, and several others.

He retired from CSIRO in 2006 to become an Honorary Research Associate.

Tony has been extensively recognized for his contributions and achievements to conservation genetics. To further broaden his expertise, he has been a visiting professor at Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside, visiting research fellow at Haifa University, Israel, and a visiting scientist at the Universitaet Osnabrueck, Germany.

Source: Extracted from:
Palmer, R.G. & Doyl, J.J. (2009) Plant Breeding Reviews, Vol.31, Dedication to Anthony Brown, Conservation Geneticist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-brown-4314a2180/
Portrait Photo: 2002. M.Fagg, CPBR website, Staff.

Collecting localities for 'Brown, A.H.D.' in Australia from AVH (2026)

Data from 149 specimens in Australasian herbaria