Associate Professor Stuart Roy has been officially appointed Director of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Hub for Wheat in a Hot and Dry Climate here at Waite, taking over from previous Director, Dr Delphine Fleury.
Stuart gained a BSc (Hons) in Plant and Environmental Biology for the University of St Andrews (UK) and a PhD in Plant Physiology from the University of Cambridge (UK). After a Broodbank Research Fellowship at Cambridge, Stuart moved to the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, University of Adelaide, to lead the Salinity Research program.
The WheatHub brings together wheat researchers and Australia’s three major wheat breeding companies to enhance productivity and secure high grain quality of wheat in the hot and dry Australian climate.
The goals of the Centre are to:
- Develop wheat with combined heat and drought tolerance by advancing existing knowledge and technologies and transferring wheat material and knowhow to breeding programmes
- Elucidate mechanisms and molecular markers for combined heat and drought tolerance by exploring genetic diversity in wheat
- Identify mechanisms and genetic diversity for high yielding wheat with efficient nitrogen recycling and high grain protein.
- Build human capacity in molecular breeding and providing breeders access to the latest scientific developments and technologies.
- Develop and test high-throughput field phenotyping tools for Australian breeders
