Matthew Gilliham

Background

About Matthew Gilliham

Matthew is Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S), leading a large scale program in space agriculture - specifically the growth and adaptation of plants to space environments and the production of novel bio products in plants to enable long-term space habitation, and to use these innovations to improve on Earth sustainability. Matthew is a current Web of Science Highly Cited Author (1 of only 196 animal and plant scientists globally). His are of research specialisation is crop plant nutrition and stress resilience with a focus on salinity and drought tolerance. Specifically, his group studies transport and signalling mechanisms underpinning these processes with the aim of having them applied through plant breeding to improve crop yield and quality in production systems. Matthew’s immediate past position was Director of the Waite Research Institute, the University of Adelaide’s flagship for agriculture, food and wine innovation, with a role to stimulate and support new research initiatives across the spectrum of agricultural research (from policy and economics, to animal, soil and crop sciences). Matthew gained a BSc in Ecology from Lancaster University and a PhD in Plant Physiology from the University of Cambridge, UK. After a postdoc at Cambridge, he immigrated to Australia to run the Plant Transport and Signalling Laboratory at the Waite Campus, University of Adelaide.