Nicholas Harberd facts for kids

Nicholas Paul Harberd FRS (born 15 July 1956) is Sibthorpian Professor of Plant Science and former head of the Department of Plant Sciences (since 2022 part of the Department of Biology) at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of St John's College, Oxford.

Education

Harberd earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours, a Master of Arts, and PhD in 1981, from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of Christ's College, Cambridge.

Career and research

He was a scientist at the Plant Breeding Institute, Trumpington, Cambridge from 1982 to 1986, and the University of California, Berkeley, from 1986 to 1988.

He is head of the Harberd group, which was located at John Innes Centre, and has been at the University of Oxford since his appointment as Sibthorpian Professor of Plant Sciences in 2007.

With George Coupland, Liam Dolan, Alison Smith, Jonathan Jones, Cathie Martin, Robert Sablowski and Abigail Amey he is a co-author of the textbook Plant Biology.

Awards and honours

Harberd was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009. His nomination reads:

Nick Harberd has made pioneering contributions to the solution of a fundamental problem in biology – the molecular mechanisms via which plant hormones control growth. He showed that the hormone gibberellin promotes growth by counteracting a family of nuclear growth-repressing proteins, and that this provides a key mechanism for adaptive regulation of growth in response to environmental change. He also showed how this mechanism underlies the action of genes responsible for the increase in yield of wheat varieties during the 'green revolution'. His discoveries have thus provided many important and original contributions to developmental, evolutionary and agricultural science.