After completing his PhD studies in the Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University (SU) in 2006, Prof Francois Roets entered the academic arena as a postdoctoral fellow of the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) at the University of Pretoria. Two years later, he accepted a lecturing position in SU’s Department of Conservation Ecology and Entomology, and in 2021, became departmental chair. He has also served as a core team member of the prestigious DSI/NRF Centre of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology (CTHB) since 2008.

Prof Roets teaches and supervises students in the broader fields of microbiology, entomology and botany, focusing on the biology, ecology, systematics and conservation of inter-organism interactions. As studies on multiple organism interactions are multidisciplinary, his research repertoire includes diverse fields such as biodiversity research, ecological experimentation, landscape ecology, molecular phylogenetics, genomics, population genetics, systematics, taxonomy, and metagenomics. These research activities rely on strong collaboration with other institutions, both locally (including the Agricultural Research Council, Hortgro, Winetech, the South African National Biodiversity Institute, and the universities of Pretoria, Cape Town and the Free State) and abroad (including the prestigious Fungal Biodiversity Centre in the Netherlands, Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, the Canadian Forestry Services, Charles University in Prague, and the University of Florida in the United States).