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2021 Seminar Series

The Institute continued the seminar series although it was reduced in number because of COVID-19, yet a number of national and international invited speakers managed to present. The public presentations included:

  • * Distinguished Professor Ian Wright presented ‘Plant form and function along environmental gradients’.
  • Dr Andy Leigh from the University of Technology, Sydney presented ‘Thermal tolerance of plants in extreme environments’.
  • * Mr John Whale presented ‘The adaptive capacity of red gum Eucalypts’.
  • * Associate Professor Rachael Gallagher presented ‘Australian Plant Conservation (and why it matters globally)’.
  • Dr Sebastian Pfautsch from the School of Social Sciences presented ‘Urban cooling beyond green infrastructure’
  • * Dr Rob Sharwood presented ‘Improving crop productivity and resilience to future climates by altering photosynthesis’.
  • * Dr Hongwei Liu presented ‘Microbiome-mediated stress resistance in plants’.
  • Dr Ryan McQuinn from the School of Science presented ‘Deciphering the VOCs of plant signalling and communication’.
  • * Dr Demi Sargent presented ‘The Gossypium genus: an untapped pool or novel photosynthetic traits for cotton’.
  • * Ms Olivia Bernauer presented ‘Native pollinators in Australian apple orchards: pollinator efficiency, foraging behaviour, phylogenetic diversity of functional traits, and natural history’.
  • Dr Jay Bose from the School of Science presented ‘Targeting chloroplasts to improve salt tolerance in plants’.
  • * Dr Lily Chen presented ‘The SWEET source to sink journey’.
  • * Professor Jeff Powell presented ‘Switching partners – the roles and relationships of dual mycorrhizal systems for eucalypts’.
  • Dr Richard Wuhrer from the Centralised Facilities Unit presented ‘Characterisation of materials and everything else in the AMC Facility’.
  • Dr Hugh Goold from NSW Department of Primary Industries presented ‘Yeast 2.0 – synthetic genomics and the world’s largest man-made genome’.
  • Dr Kailiang Yu from Princeton University presented ‘Leveraging ground-based observations to understand land carbon storage under global change’.
  • * Mr Yazen Al-Salman presented ‘Determinants of leaf water use efficiency in the C4 crop Sorghum Bicolor’.
  • Dr Frances Sussmilch from the University of Tasmania presented ‘Guard cell signalling and clues about their origins’.
  • Dr Alex Maisey from La Trobe University presented ‘The role of the superb lyrebird as an ecosystem engineer’.
  • * Dr Eleonora Egidi presented ‘Harnessing microbes to boost drought tolerance in grasses’.
  • Dr Sean Michaletz from the University of British Columbia presented ‘Do the kinetics of leaf physiology “scale up” to higher levels of organization?’


* Denotes HIE employee/graduating student