Staff

David is interested in many areas concerning seed analysis, storage, and the end uses of combinable and forage crops. Currently he holds the position of laboratory manager in the biochemistry department at NIAB where he specialises in crop quality testing, especially with respect to malting and feed barley, milling and feed wheat and oilseed rape.

Ben's role within NIAB covers two main areas, that of a technical grower and in business development.

As a FACTS Qualified Advisor (Hort) Ben provides technical growing advice from his base at NIAB’s Park Farm glasshouse facility. He also produces bespoke fertigation systems and oversees the set up of protected/controlled environment facilities for all crops such as ornamentals, fruit, vegetables, cereals and legumes.

Ben's role within business development is to share his previous commercial experience and help develop ideas into actionable trials for NIAB’s customers.

Tally is a quantitative geneticist and data analyst working with Dr Keith Gardner, programme leader in quantitative genetics at NIAB. Tally works across a range of ongoing research projects in Cambridge Crop Research division and is involved in the analysis and design of a number of diverse and important NIAB wheat collections.

Research interests:

Research interests:

Jake has a background in agriculture and studied BSc Biological Sciences at Durham University from 2012 to 2016. During his undergraduate degree he took a placement year at the National Botanic Garden of Wales where he studied honeybee foraging using DNA barcoding. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he became a field trials technician at NIAB in the ACC team, where he completed his crop inspector training. Jake is now a PhD student on the BBSRC Doctoral Training Programme.

Yeorgia is a PhD student in NIAB's Cambridge Crop Science division, working on hybrid wheat. Her main project uses wheat with genes from ancestral species to assess whether the increased genetic diversity has an effect on yield in hybrids. She is also doing a transcriptomics experiment to look at the changes in gene expression in hybrid wheat.

Prior to this Yeorgia attained her undergraduate degree at the University of Reading and completed a six-month placement at NIAB looking at the genetics of wheat roots.

Research title:

The effects of legume rotations on soil microbial populations

Harvey's studies will involve field sampling, molecular biology and computational studies and he is TMAF's first fully funded PhD student. This inaugural studentship ties in with TMAF’s long-term interests in soil quality.

Duration: September 2020-2024

Partners: NIAB, University of Cambridge, The Morley Agricultural Foundation

Research interests

Technical support to the Crop Science and Production Systems Department and the Genetics, Genomics and Breeding Department at NIAB EMR for the installation, maintenance and monitoring of technologies needed to deliver precision irrigation and fertigation regimes in polytunnel, controlled environments and field experiments/trials.