Giles Oldroyd | |
|---|---|
| Born | Giles Edward Dixon Oldroyd |
| Education | University of East Anglia University of California, Berkeley |
| Awards | Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Plant symbioses[1] |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge Stanford University Donald Danforth Plant Science Center |
| Thesis | Identification and characterization of Prf a resistance gene in tomato (1998) |
| Notable students | Yiliang Ding |
| Website | www |
Giles Edward Dixon OldroydFRS is a British plant scientist and president of theDonald Danforth Plant Science Center.[2] He previously served as a professor at theUniversity of Cambridge,[1][3] where he worked on legume symbioses inMedicago truncatula.[4] He has been a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award winner and the Society of Biology (SEB) President's Medal winner.[5] According to Clarivate Analytics, Oldroyd was listed among the top 1% of highly cited researchers in plant sciences in multiple years beginning in 2014.[6]
Oldroyd attended Huntington School, York before studying for a BA degree in plant biology at theUniversity of East Anglia from 1990 to 1994.[7] He completed hisPhD in 1998 at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, studying plant/pathogen interactions intomatoes.[8]
After his PhD, he moved toStanford University to work as apostdoctoral scientist studying legume/rhizobial interactions in the laboratory ofSharon R. Long.[9][10][11] In 2002, Oldroyd moved to theJohn Innes Centre to start his own research group and in 2017 he moved his research group to the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge. In 2020, Oldroyd was appointed to the Russel R Geiger Professorship of Crop Science in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge and Director of the new Crop Science Centre, a partnership between the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany.
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.
In 2012, Oldroyd was part of a collaboration that received a US$10 million research grant from theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation to study nitrogen-fixing symbioses in cereal crops, aiming to engineer cereal crops such asmaize to undergo the beneficialroot nodule symbiosis.[12][13] The Enabling Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture (ENSA) project received a further $35 million grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations in 2023.[14]
As of January 2026, he has anh-index of 87, according toGoogle Scholar.[1]
