Paul Quick
Professor Paul Quick provides research linkages with our partner institution, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). He currently leads the Gates Funded
Professor Paul Quick provides research linkages with our partner institution, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). He led the Gates Funded C4 Rice Project at IRRI. He was responsible for the day to day operation of research activities at IRRI and for coordinating IRRI’s work with the global C4 rice program. The nature of his science interests means he interacts with all the four research programs at the Centre.
Paul completed a Bachelor of Science at University of Essex, UK in 1981, followed by a PhD at the University of Sheffield in 1984.
He is internationally known for his research into a range of areas related to understanding chlorophyll fluorescence, photosynthetic stress biology, regulation of the photosynthetic ATPase, and photosynthetic metabolic biology. He pioneered the use of transgenic plants for functional analysis of plant metabolism. His research demonstrated the direct link between the light and dark reactions of photosynthesis, which led to non-intrusively investigate this process using modulated chlorophyll fluorescence. This work was highly cited in literature and opened a new field in plant photosynthesis, particularly in plant stress biology.
In 2009, Paul took up the leadership of the Gates-funded C4 Rice Project, a multi-disciplinary consortium from around the word to improve the photosynthetic efficiency of rice by engineering C4 photosynthesis into it. His role is to coordinate integration of translational research into IRRI programs and to provide screening capacity for diverse germplasm.
Paul was part of the Centre from 2014 to 2021