Matthew Gilliham

Matthew is Director of the Waite Research Institute, the University of Adelaide’s flagship for agriculture, food and wine innovation. As Director 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 the field. Matthew is also developing programs 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.

Matthew is a current Web of Science Highly Cited Author (1 of only 196 animal and plant scientists globally). He and his research group have won a number of other awards, honours and fellowships for their work, including ARC Future Fellowships, ARC DECRA Fellowships, ASPB Highly Cited Author, SA Tall Poppy Awards, the Australian Society for Plant Scientists Goldacre Award, and the Australian Federal Government Science and Innovation Award for Young People in Agriculture.

Matthew’s current or recent roles include Professor of Crop Molecular Physiology in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, program leader in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Energy Biology, Chief Investigator on the ARC Training Centre for Innovative Wine Production, convenor for the Adapting to abiotic stress and climate change special interest group of the Society for Experimental Biology, UK, member of the South Australian Government's Science and Innovation Council and Honorary Secretary of the Australian Society for Plant Scientists.

Matthew gained a BSc in Ecology from Lancaster University and a PhD in Plant Physiology from the University of Cambridge, UK. After a postdoc at Cambridge, he immigrated to Australia to run the Plant Transport and Signalling Laboratory at the Waite Campus, University of Adelaide.