About

Jenny Mortimer is Associate Professor of Plant Synthetic Biology at the University of Adelaide, Australia, in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine & The Waite Research Institute. She is also an Affiliate Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, and a Director of Plant Systems Biology at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, USA. After completing her PhD at Cambridge University, UK, she began exploring how to engineer plant biomass to deliver sustainable and economically viable biofuels: first as a postdoc in Cambridge, then as a research fellow at RIKEN Japan, before joining Berkeley Lab in 2014, and Adelaide in 2021. Her and her team's goal is to develop crops which contribute to a sustainable and renewable bioeconomy.

At Adelaide, her group is using synthetic biology to develop new crops for food and materials production in controlled growth environments – including for Space settlement, as part of the newly formed Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence "Plants for Space" (P4S), and applying new agricultural biotechnologies to develop resilient field crops in the ARC Training Centre for Future Crops Development. She was a World Economic Forum Young Scientist (2016/17), and is a passionate science communicator, most recently on ABC's BTN.