2012 SA Tall Poppy Award

Matthew accepting his award from
the South Australian Governor
Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce.

Dr Matthew Gilliham was named as a SA Tall Poppy of Science at a ceremony at Government House. This is one of eight awards that recognise the State's best early career researchers. For more details see this blog from the Waite Research Institute.

The Tall Poppy campaign, established by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science (AIPS), promotes public awareness of Australia's intellectual achievements. These awards acknowledge outstanding work by early career researchers and the significance of their research to the broader community.

PCP Lab @ COMBIO

Talks will be given by PCP Lab PhD Students Bo Xu (salt tolerance in wheat) on Wednesday morning and Sam Henderson (salt tolerance in grapevine) on Thursday afternoon at COMBIO this September. Other members will be giving posters too, Bo Li and Jiaen Qiu (salt tolerance in Arabidopsis), Brad Hocking (composition of grape cell walls) and Sunita Ramesh (control of organic anion efflux).

Matt Gilliham will also be co-charing a symposium on plant nutrient and water transport with Mel Zeppel from Monash on Wednesday morning. Come along and hear some cool stuff.

Invited speaker @ Food Security 2012

Food Security: Science, Sustainability and Governance, to be held on 27-28 September 2012 will address the challenges facing food security and will bring together business, industry, government, and academics to discuss practical solutions for local and global concerns.

http://www.informa.com.au/conferences/food-conference/food-security-science-sustainability-and-governance

Salt tolerant wheat - Nature Biotechnology

Our paper on improving the salt tolerance of wheat was published by Nature Biotechnology in March. It is the first study to show a considerable improvement in the salinity tolerance of a cereal crop in the field through the manipulation of a particular gene - we demonstrated a 25% increase in grain yield compared to the parental variety. The work was the result of a strong collaboration with our colleagues at CSIRO Plant Industry in Canberra, Rana Munns and Richard James, and other research agencies including the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics. 

The paper has since received considerable interest from around the world, both from the scientific community and the media.

For a lay summary of the work see our Scientific American article.

A few of the media stories and links to audio see below.

Austrade
BBC World Service (after 8m20s)

ABC Radio Bush Telegraph
ABC Radio AM
ABC Radio National
The Australian
The Times of India
New Scientist

Also an interesting report that includes the view of the farmer involved in the study.

Reportage

 

Invited talk @ 4th Grapevine Research Co-ordination Network Meeting

Matt Gilliham will give an invited talk at the 4th Annual Grapevine Research Co-ordination meeting on rootstock genomics. The meeting will be held in Corvallis Oregon in July 2012. See here for the meeting website.