Dr. Lily Eurwilaichitr, Deputy Director of BIOTEC, has been elected to the Executive Board of the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) serving a 3-year term from 2017-2020. The election was made at the WFCC Executive Board Meeting recently held on 18 July 2016 in Singapore. In addition to Lily, the newly-elected WFCC Executive Board comprises Dr. Ipek Kurtböke (Australia, President & Editor Newsletter), Prof. Kevin McCluskey (USA, Vice-President), Dr. Marizeth Groenewald (the Netherlands, Secretary), Dr. Andrey Yurkov (Germany, Treasurer), Dr. Juncai Ma (China, Director of WDCM, Ex officio), Dr. Kyria Boundy-Mills (USA, Member), Dr. Manuela da Silva (Brazil, Member), Prof. Shuang-Jiang Liu (China, Member), Dr. Anabela Martins (Portugal, Member), Dr. G.S. Prasad (India, Member), Dr. Cledir Santos (Chile, Member), Prof. Ken-ichiro Suzuki (Japan, Member) and Dr. Philippe Desmeth (Belgium, Ex officio).
The WFCC is the main international body that coordinates the activities of culture collections around the world. Their activities include lobbying for support for collections, preventing the loss of collections, promoting the use of collections, and coordinating international regulations relating to the shipping and use of biological materials. Membership of the WFCC has reached 716 culture collections worldwide, holding over 2.4 million strains in total.
Presently, Lily also serves as Director of the Thailand Bioresource Research Center (TBRC), a non-profit center founded under BIOTEC/NSTDA in 2015 to preserve, provide and facilitate the coordination of exchange of biological information and resources and develop mechanisms enabled by information technologies to broaden access to biomaterials to the public and scientific community. She also led BIOTEC to become an active member in various international bodies dealing with microbial resources such as the Asian Consortium for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Microbial Resources (ACM), the Asian Network of Resource Research Centers (ANRRC) and the ASEAN Network on Microbial Utilization (AnMicro).