About

Matthew is Director of the Waite Research Institute, the University of Adelaide’s flagship for agriculture, food and wine innovation. His role is to stimulate and support new research initiatives across the spectrum of agricultural research (from policy and economics, to animal, soil and crop sciences).

Matthew’s areas 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.

As Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S) he is 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.