Giles Oldroyd

Professor Giles E. D. Oldroyd is a Plant scientist at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, working on beneficial Legume symbiosis in Medicago truncatula. He has been a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award winner and the Society of Biology (SEB) President's Medal winner. In 2014 Giles was in the top 1% of highly cited scientists across the world.

Giles attended Huntington School, York before studying for his Honours degree in Biology at the University of East Anglia from 1990 to 1994. He completed his PhD in 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley, studying plant/pathogen interactions and then moved to Stanford University to work as a post doctoral scientist studying legume/rhizobial interactions in the laboratory of Sharon R. Long. In 2002, Giles moved to the John Innes Centre to start his own research group.

Giles Oldroyd's work focuses on understanding the signalling mechanisms that allow the associations with these beneficial micro-organisms and the use of this information to transfer the nitrogen-fixing capability from legumes to cereal crops. His website says "Our work has implications for global agriculture, but we are most interested in the application of our work to benefit small-holder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa".

In 2012 Giles Oldroyd was awarded a $10M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to begin the Engineering Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa (ENSA) Project in collaboration with other symbiosis research groups. The aim of the research is to engineer cereal crops such as Maize to undergo the beneficial Root Nodule symbiosis in order to obtain the nutrient Nitrogen without the application of agricultural fertilisers.

• BBSRC David Phillips Fellow 2002-2007
• Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award 2002-2005
• European Molecular Biology Organization Young Investigator Award 2005-2008
• Presidents Medal, Society of Experimental Biology (SEB), 2006
• European Research Council young investigator 2009–Present
• Thomson Reuters Top 1% Highly cited researcher 2014