PhD Students
Mr Jake Moscrop
Research interests:
Jake has a background in agriculture and studied BSc Biological Sciences at Durham University from 2012 to 2016. During his undergraduate degree he took a placement year at the National Botanic Garden of Wales where he studied honeybee foraging using DNA barcoding. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he became a field trials technician at NIAB in the ACC team, where he completed his crop inspector training. Jake is now a PhD student on the BBSRC Doctoral Training Programme.
Miss Yeorgia Argirou
Yeorgia is a PhD student in NIAB's Cambridge Crop Science division, working on hybrid wheat. Her main project uses wheat with genes from ancestral species to assess whether the increased genetic diversity has an effect on yield in hybrids. She is also doing a transcriptomics experiment to look at the changes in gene expression in hybrid wheat.
Prior to this Yeorgia attained her undergraduate degree at the University of Reading and completed a six-month placement at NIAB looking at the genetics of wheat roots.
Miss Emily Marr
Research title:
The genetic dissection of root system architecture in wheat
Mr Harvey Armstrong
Research title:
The effects of legume rotations on soil microbial populations
Harvey's studies will involve field sampling, molecular biology and computational studies and he is TMAF's first fully funded PhD student. This inaugural studentship ties in with TMAF’s long-term interests in soil quality.
Duration: September 2020-2024
Partners: NIAB, University of Cambridge, The Morley Agricultural Foundation
Ms Magdalena Cobo Medina
Research interests
Magdalena is a PhD student working on apple rootstocks, an essential component of successful tree fruit production. The main aim of her project is to understand the effect of dwarfing on root system architecture in apple allowing assessment of dwarfing-associated root development on nitrogen uptake.
Research projects
Combining root architecture, root function and soil management to improve production efficiency and quality of apples; Duration: Oct 2017-Sept 2021; Partners: CTP and University of Nottingham; Funding: CTP
Mr Matteo Luberti
Research interests
I obtained a BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics as well as a MSc in Plant Genetics and Breeding from the University of East Anglia. My PhD is focussed on elucidating resistance mechanisms to Phytophthora cactorum in apple and strawberry.
Research projects
Investigating durable resistance to Phytophthora cactorum in strawberry and apple; Duration: October 2018–October 2022; Partners: NIAB EMR – University of Reading; Funding: CTP
