Adelaide uni plants its new vice-chancellor

University of Adelaide's new vice-chancellor, Prof James McWha, is a plant biologist with plans to strengthen the university's already large contributions to research and development.

"I want to underscore the very high research outputs of the university. The University of Adelaide traditionally has been very strong in the biosciences," McWha said.

He takes up his new appointment on August 4, leaving his current position as vice-chancellor and president of Massey University in New Zealand.

McWha said that he was keen to see that the long history of the Waite campus, home to an internationally renowned agricultural research complex with government and industry partners including several CRCs, CSIRO, the South Australian Research and Development Institute and the Australian Wine Research Institute, would be maintained and expanded.

"Adelaide has a very wide range of partnerships and we would be looking to strengthen them," he said.

McWha is also keen to foster commercial development of research at the university.

"Adelaide is well placed to take advantage of biotechnology developments," he said. "The university needs a mechanism to turn good ideas into commercial opportunities. The important thing is to make sure that it has appropriate systems in place to aid the commercialisation of research."

Prof Edwina Cornish, the deputy vice-chancellor for research at Adelaide, said that McWha would bring a sophisticated understanding of research to the university.

"You couldn't really ask for a better match with the university's strengths. It's a very exciting appointment." she said.

Cornish said that she believed that McWha would support the growing commercialisation of research at the university.

"At Massey University he has been very entrepreneurial and Massey has grown under him," Cornish said.

"Given the recent successes that we have had with the new Centre for Plant Functional Genomics and the Biotechnology Centre for Excellence bid, he comes to a university that is performing well nationally. It gives him a tremendous resource to work with and hopefully it will take us up another notch."