Giles Oldroyd


Professor Giles E. D. Oldroyd is a Plant scientist at the University of Cambridge, working on beneficial Legume symbioses in Medicago truncatula. He has been a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award winner and the Society of Biology President's Medal winner. From 2014 Giles has been in the top 1% of highly cited plant scientists across the world.

Education

Giles attended Huntington School, York before studying for his Honours degree in Biology at the University of East Anglia from 1990 to 1994. He completed his PhD in 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley, studying plant/pathogen interactions and then moved to Stanford University to work as a post doctoral scientist studying legume/rhizobial interactions in the laboratory of Prof Sharon R. Long. In 2002, Giles moved to the John Innes Centre to start his own research group and in 2017 he moved his research group to the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge.

Research

Giles Oldroyd's work focuses on understanding the signalling mechanisms that allow the associations with these beneficial micro-organisms and the use of this information to transfer the nitrogen-fixing capability from legumes to cereal crops.
His website says "Our work has implications for global agriculture, but we are most interested in the application of our work to benefit small-holder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa".
In 2012 Giles Oldroyd was awarded a $10m grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to begin the Engineering Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa Project in collaboration with other symbiosis research groups. The aim of the research is to engineer cereal crops such as Maize to undergo the beneficial Root Nodule symbiosis in order to obtain the nutrient Nitrogen without the application of agricultural fertilisers.

Awards and Notability