Ian Mackay

  Ian.Mackay@sruc.ac.uk

Scotland’s Rural College
W Mains Rd
Edinburgh
EH9 3JG

Institute Staff Profile

Biography

I am Professor of Plant Breeding at SRUC, based at the Edinburgh campus, though I spend most of my time working from home in Essex. I research the development and application of quantitative methods to plant breeding, and am now also involved in some animal breeding projects. The methods I use are those of quantitative genetics and statistics.

I started my working life as a commercial plant breeder, including nine years as Research Director of Lion Seeds, Ltd., a company established by a successful management buy-out of which I was part.

In 1999 I left Lion Seeds to take an opportunity to 'retool' through a position building and running the Statistical Genetics unit of a human genetics / biopharmaceutical company, Oxagen Ltd., which had been established as a spin-out from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford. After six years there, I moved back to crop science and plant genetics, firstly at NIAB and then at SRUC.