Assistant Professor in Sustainable Agricultural Systems, Civic Lead for the Faculty of Science, University of Nottingham

I am an Assistant Professor in Sustainable Agricultural Systems at the University of Nottingham. I am an interdisciplinary specialist, working across the social and natural sciences, with a focus on identifying win-wins for sustainable food systems.

My PhD research was on reducing pesticide use through Integrated Pest Management techniques, and used long term field trial data and farmer surveys to identify practical management options which maintained yields without pesticide application (such as varietal resistance), thus delivering both environmental and economic benefits.

Building on this, I have worked with stakeholders across Europe to identify priorities for crop breeding to build resilience to climate change and am now involved in a project assessing farmer attitudes towards precision bred crops to achieve some of these aims in England, where this technology has recently been legalised.

I am also currently working on a project assessing the potential for voluntary biodiversity credits to provide an economic incentive to farmers and land managers to increase biodiversity on-farm. Our work explores questions around whether or not these credits can actually deliver biodiversity benefits, whether they can be designed to avoid trade-offs and biodiversity offsetting, and what effects they might have on local communities and actual farmer behaviour, in order to contribute to the wider debate around land sparing versus land sharing and policy and regulation of this market.