A huge congratulations to two AACS members who won their respective categories at the Australian Cotton Conference Awards Dinner on 8 August:

Dr Lisa Bird (NSW DPI) was awarded the Cotton Seed Distributors Researcher of the Year.
Lisa plays an essential role in the cotton industry’s surveillance for insecticide resistance, testing aphids, helicoverpa, mirids, mites, and thrips, with her results incorporated into cotton’s Insecticide Resistance Management Strategy (IRMS) each year.

Sharna Holman (DAF Queensland) was awarded the CRDC Chris Lehmann Young Cotton Achiever of the Year.
Sharna is the Biosecurity Tech Lead for CottonInfo, who is also currently completing a CRDC-supported PhD focusing on the pest status of cluster caterpillar in northern Australia.

See the Cotton Australia media release for official photographs.

Once again, AACS is organising embroidered long-sleeve cotton shirts suitable for field, office or socialising at conferences.  Available in 4 colours and more size options than you can poke a stick at, these shirts are great value.

Orders will close on 28 June, to give us enough time to get them embroidered ready for the Cotton Conference in August.  Orders shirts here…

The 2023 Cotton Research Conference has drawn to a close, and on behalf of AACS, we’d like to thank all those who contributed to making it such a success:

The 2023 Conference Committee, co-chaired by Alison McCarthy and Joe Foley worked extremely hard to ensure the conference ran smoothy. Other committee members were Warren Conaty, Lucy Egan, Paul Grundy, Kristen Knight, Susan Maas, Nicole McDonald, Guna Nachimuthu, Megan Woodward, Linda Smith, and Li Zitong.

A huge thanks to our official conference sponsors (CRDC, CSD, CSIRO, Bayer and UniSQ), and to INCYT who supported the coffee cart.

Thanks to the helpful staff and volunteers at both the main venue (Empire Theatre) and the dinner venue (UniSQ Refectory).

And finally…  thank you to all the delegates who presented and attended. Without you there would be no conference, so we hope you enjoyed yourselves, met old friends and made some new ones, and above all, took something useful away with you from this event.

The 5th Australian Cotton Research Conference is underway, with around 170 delegates registered, and a wide-ranging program with some fascinating presentation titles. We hope all attendees find the next few days both interesting and informative.