Introduction to Sean Loakes

As some of you will have already seen from previous posts; I’m Sean Loakes and I’ve joined the Syngenta UK & Ireland team as Technical Manager. Luckily for me Glenn’s not completely disappearing but is supporting a wider area moving forward. He’ll still be available to share his knowledge and expertise which is a great comfort to me when starting out.

Not an effective fungicide and not fit for human consumption

But enough about Glenn! I’ve spent the last 11 years as a trialist for a contract research organisation, that’s an independent company which does testing for major chemical manufacturers to help select, develop and register new products. My role was to design and deliver scientific studies, as well as in later years inspecting other scientists work for quality compliance. One of the great things about working for an independent research company was the huge variety of different studies I would get to work on. From laboratory tests, through plot trials to full field studies in the UK, EU and USA. My days could be spent digging up chafer grubs or sheeting leather jackets for use in lab trials, or assessing dollar spot control products.

Over my time, I’ve worked on mainly conventional chemistry (insecticides, fungicides etc.), but also biologicals and behavioral controls (traps/attractants/repellents). I’m excited to see where the new products in the Syngenta pipeline will fit into an ITM programme and talk about how we can get the most out of these products.

With my trials background in mind, I’m hoping to set up and communicate user trials moving forward and get people involved in those which should hopefully generate some interesting local site-specific data, which at the end of the day is the stuff we’re all most interested in.

As a science led company Syngenta has loads of data being generated and sitting in archives so if anyone has any questions or wants more information on a pest or disease please get in touch and I can try to build that into future content.

In the future Glenn and I will both be involved in writing these blogs so if you’ve been loving the content up until now don’t worry, we have no plans to change that, we should be able to share even more industry insights this way.

Make sure you come over and say "hi" at BTME next week, I look forward to meeting some of you.

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