Bio
Dr. Simon Gilroy is a professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the USA. He grew up in the United Kingdom and studied plant biology for his undergraduate degree at Cambridge University and for his Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He did a postdoc at the University of California-Berkeley before starting his own research group, first at The Pennsylvania State University before moving to Wisconsin. His laboratory uses a combination of molecular genetics and advanced imaging approaches to understand how plants sense and respond to their environment. This research centers on how plants react to a range of biotic and abiotic stresses such as gravity, touch, herbivory and flooding. Recent work has focused on how elements of a network of Ca2+, reactive oxygen species and electrical signals combine to support rapid, organism-wide signaling throughout the plant body. An additional research focus in the lab is dissecting similar signaling networks but in the plant systems responding to the unique stressors of spaceflight. For these projects, his group has flown multiple plant biology experiments to the International Space Station.