Dr. Jeanette Balindong obtained her BSc degree in Agriculture from the University of the Philippines at Los Baños (UPLB) in 2005, and passed the licensure examination for Agriculture at the same year. She started her research career as a plant pathologist at Marsman-Drysdale Biotech and Research Corporation, Davao del Norte Philippines, and then became a research technician at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). Jeanette has various achievements during her tenure at IRRI. She was promoted as a researcher, received a full scholarship from the Rockefeller Golden Rice Project, obtained her MSc degree in Genetics in the UPLB and was hired back as assistant scientist by the institute. Jeanette gained deeper knowledge and practical experiences from working on various projects at IRRI dealing with drought resistance and rice biofortification using lysine, ferritin and iron-transporter genes as well as golden rice. She performed construction of overexpression vectors, gene silencing, DNA sequencing and tissue culture work. Jeanette's research interest has revolved around understanding and managing the different components of plant foods. Within this sphere, her research has encompassed increasing and diverse range of activities. Recently, she worked on rice grain proteins and its role in eating quality and grain breakage as her PhD project. Her research project involves identification of an improved extraction method and use of high performance liquid chromatography to characterise rice proteins, investigation of the relationship between rice grain protein composition and instrumental measures of rice cooking and eating quality, identification of the influence of the rice grain protein composition on HRY and determination whether nitrogen fertilisation impacts on the protein composition, and consequently HRY, in a subset of Australian rice genotypes. She has hands-on experience on molecular biology and analytical chemistry techniques used in plant science, specifically in the field of rice research. Jeanette is currently completing (or addressing minor comments from her examiners and preparing the final copy of her PhD thesis) a PhD degree in Plant Science at Southern Cross University (SCU), Lismore, NSW Australia and was offered an analytical officer position by Analytical Research Laboratory at SCU

Dr. Jeanette Balindong reserch interests are Agriculture and plant science.