Giles Oldroyd

Giles Edward Dixon Oldroyd is a professor at the University of Cambridge, working on beneficial Legume symbioses in Medicago truncatula. He has been a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award winner and the Society of Biology (SEB) President's Medal winner. From 2014 Oldroyd has been in the top 1% of highly cited plant scientists across the world.

Education
Oldroyd attended Huntington School, York before studying for a BA degree in plant biology at the University of East Anglia from 1990 to 1994. He completed his PhD in 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley, studying plant/pathogen interactions in tomatoes.

Career and research
After his PhD, he moved to Stanford University to work as a postdoctoral scientist studying legume/rhizobial interactions in the laboratory of Sharon R. Long. In 2002, Oldroyd moved to the John Innes Centre to start his own research group and in 2017 he moved his research group to the Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge. In 2020 Oldroyd was appointed to the Russel R Geiger Professorship of Crop Science in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge and Director of the new Crop Science Centre, a partnership between the University of Cambridge and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany.

Oldroyd's work focuses on understanding the signalling mechanisms that allow the associations with these beneficial micro-organisms and the use of this information to transfer the nitrogen-fixing capability from legumes to cereal crops. His website says "Our work has implications for global agriculture, but we are most interested in the application of our work to benefit small-holder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa".

In 2012 Oldroyd was awarded a $10m research grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in collaboration with other symbiosis research groups. Their aim is to engineer cereal crops such as maize to undergo the beneficial root nodule symbiosis in order to obtain the nutrient Nitrogen without the application of agricultural fertilisers. The Enabling Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture (ENSA) project received a further $35 million grant from Bill & Melinda Gates Agricultural Innovations in 2023.

As of March 2023, he has an h-index of 81 according to Google Scholar.

Awards and honours

 * BBSRC David Phillips Fellow 2002-2007
 * Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award 2002-2005
 * European Molecular Biology Organization Young Investigator Award 2005-2008
 * Presidents Medal, Society for Experimental Biology (SEB), 2006
 * European Research Council young investigator 2009–Present
 * Thomson Reuters Top 1% Highly cited researcher 2014
 * Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) 2020