Duncan Fitzpatrick
Duncan has returned to the Centre’s ANU Node , where he did his PhD project. He is now working with the Farquhar group, following a three year post-doc with Eva-Mari Aro in Finland. His work in Finland primarily focused on the application and development of MIMS based gas exchange measurements and covered a broad range of research areas including: thylakoid membrane ROS formation and signaling, a mechanism for coral bleaching, characterising the performance and physiology of cyanobacterial ‘cell factories’, examining the photosynthetic performance of kleptotrophic sea-slugs and the functional characterisation of a number of interesting proteins in plants and cyanobacteria involved in respiration and photosynthesis.
During his post-doc he has honed his capacity to deconvolute photosynthetic and respiratory gas fluxes during illumination through the simultaneous enrichment of both stable oxygen and carbon isotopes and has developed his interest and understanding of photosynthetic regulation, interactions between the chloroplast and mitochondria and cellular energy budgeting. His new project will focus on the kinetics of CO2 assimilation to examine a number of assumptions underpinning key mechanistic models of photosynthesis.