Last week saw the end to our very successful conference, Global Biosecurity 2010. This was the first conference where the animal and plant biosecurity sectors were brought together through the collaboration of three CRCs.

As I stated at the opening of the conference, the key objective was to get researchers from the different sector to listen and learn from each other. I believe we achieved this and as one plant researcher said to me ' ..I have made an effort to only go to talks on subjects I know nothing about and I have learnt more at this conference than I have at any other conference'.

It was a credit to our CRC to see the breadth of talks given by researchers and PhD students. I compliment all who presented at the conference. In particular, a special congratulations to Bo Zhang, one of our PhD students who won the Springer student poster award.

Conferences of this size do not happen without the efforts of people and sponsors. The CRC is very proud of the large effort made by Kate Scott. Without her efforts the conference would not have been the success it was. I also thank the other Canberra office staff and CRC participants who contributed to making the event successful.

HAL, GRDC, ACERA, AQIS, QUT, PHA and Springer all provided sponsorship which enabled the conference to be a success.

The success of the conference is a positive step for our re-bid.

Simon