As a kid grow­ing up on the east coast of Aus­tralia, Ian was fas­cin­ated by the world around him and how eleg­antly sci­ence could be used to find out more about it. He wanted to be a sci­ent­ist work­ing at the CSIRO — Australia’s renowned research organ­isa­tion. He stud­ied bio­chem­istry and genet­ics as part of his Bach­elor of Sci­ence degree and achieved his dream by work­ing at the CSIRO research­ing plant genetics.

He found, how­ever, that there was a lot of con­cern in the com­munity about genet­ic­ally mod­i­fied crops — so he focussed his efforts on cre­at­ing and present­ing edu­ca­tion pro­grams to school stu­dents, industry, politi­cians, legal pro­fes­sion­als and journalists.

In a turn of fate that brought him to cent­ral Vic­toria, he became inter­ested in the effi­cient man­age­ment of nat­ural resources and the impact/benefits this has on busi­ness viab­il­ity. This interest led to the com­ple­tion of his MBA and a nice cup of tea.