Malcolm Hawkesford

About him:

Malcolm Hawkesford is head of the Plant Sciences Department at Rothamsted Research and leads the Institutes contribution to the UK Designing Future Wheat programme. He is an Honorary Professor in Plant Sciences in the School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham. He is a crop scientist specializing in cereal research at the field and molecular level, particularly with regard to resource use efficiency, yield and quality. He is also an investigator on two Newton bilateral nitrogen programmes with Brazil and India, in the Defra Wheat Genetic Improvement Network and multiple BBSRC-funded projects aimed at optimizing resource use in wheat. He is the lead scientist for a major wheat GMO release experiment in 2017 and 2019 at Rothamsted. He is also chair of the Nutrient Use Efficiency expert working group of the International Wheat Initiative which includes participation worldwide. Recently he has led initiatives at Rothamsted on field phenotyping facilities, utilizing both drone technology and a novel ground-based state of the art robotic system.

About his talk:

"Productivity traits and field phenotyping"

The presentation will outline approaches and areas of work within the Designing Future Wheat project, focussed on productivity and efficiency. Results on germplasm diversity and nitrogen use efficiency will be presented. The emphasis will be on challenges and solutions for both high throughput and high-resolution phenotyping of field trials.