Introduction          

I went to Sandford Park School in Dublin, Ireland, and studied for my undergraduate degree at the University of Dublin, Trinity College. I moved to Oxford in 2003 to do my DPhil in the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology. Following my DPhil I spent a short post-doctoral period in the Oxford Centre for Integrative Systems Biology and the Centre for Mathematical Biology before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and Browne Junior Research Fellowship at the Department of Plant Sciences and The Queen’s College, respectively.

I am now a Fellow in Biology at Queen’s and hold a Royal Society University Fellowship at the Department of Plant Sciences. In addition, I am Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Plant Science Innovation and editor-in-chief of Biology Open.

Teaching

I teach across a range of subjects in the biological sciences from plant domestication, to photosynthesis, to computational approaches to understanding gene regulatory networks.

Research

Plants convert solar energy into chemical energy through photosynthesis. In doing so, they provide all of the oxygen that we breathe and produce the sugars that form the basis of the global food chain. My laboratory studies the biology of photosynthesis in plants, answering key questions about how it evolved, how it works, and how it is controlled. We study these questions with an overarching goal to engineer the crop plants of the future, and enable food production to keep pace with global population increase.

Publications

Please see Steve’s Google Scholar page for an up-to-date list of his publications.