Research interests
My personal research interest includes:
- Developing climate resilient crops, with emphasis on high temperature stress and drought (wheat, rice, legumes)
- Enhancing nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) use efficiency in crops to reduce fertiliser use (related to root growth, and gene and pathway dissection)
Leadership
In my role as group leader, I envision to develop an efficient, multi-disciplinary approach to access and exploit the tremendous genetic diversity that is available within wheat and other crops, and to make this useful for breeders and farmers and enhance sustainability of our food systems.
Over the past years tremendous progress has been made in developing genetic populations (especially for wheat within the BBSRC-funded Designing Future Wheat programme) and an ever-increasing amount of genome sequences and other molecular data are available for most crops. We are now all set to embark on an exciting journey of discovering the many beneficial traits and underlying genes that are present in this material, and to make this usable for breeding.