Dr Jasper Rees was educated at Oxford University, and as a postdoc in the USA. He was a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University, and then the Professor of Biochemistry at the University of the Western Cape from 1995. During the following 15 years, he played an important role in building one of the largest Biotechnology Departments in South Africa.

In 2010 Dr Rees moved to the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) in Pretoria, as the Head of the ARC Biotechnology Platform, where he was responsible for the establishment of advanced facilities for genomics and bioinformatics, and their application in plant genomics and molecular pathology on wheat, sorghum, maize, apples, sweetpotato and cassava. In 2014 he was appointed as the Group Executive for Research and Innovation Systems at the ARC, where he was responsible for biotechnology, engineering, natural resource management and informatics.

In 2020, Dr Rees joined the Botswana University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BUAN) as its first Vice Chancellor. During the following two years BUAN developed and implemented a new strategy focussed on increasing research capacity and postgraduate training, and on developing entrepreneurial graduates.

Since 2022, Dr Rees has been based in South Africa undertaking consultancy projects for in South Africa and Eswatini in agriculture, genomics and the bioeconomy.