James Hutton Institute

Jennifer Brown

The focus of my research is the cell biology of plant-pathogen interactions, in particular between the notorious oomycete pathogen Phytophthora infestans, the causal agent of the devastating potato late blight, and its hosts. This pathogen manipulates plant defence responses on multiple levels, suggesting complex exchanges of signals between host and pathogen and a variety of effector functions.

Keith is a post-doctoral research assistant working in the Societies, Institutions and Governance sub-group of the Social, Economic and Geographical Sciences group here at the James Hutton Institute. He has a research and teaching background in resource management, conservation biology and habitat modelling for species conservation in the UK and overseas. He then moved, via studies on wildlife related human conflict, to researching issues around stakeholder attitudes, collaborative processes and governance structures in relation to natural resource management challenges.

Senior computational biologist with research interests in the development and application of computational methods for virus diagnostics, functional genomics, transcription regulation and protein-nucleic-acid interactions.

Angela has vast experience of spectral interpretation. She is working on NSIS soils to obtain spectral information and making correlations with Carbon data and developing an analytical method for a portable FTIR instrument using NSIS soils to replicate field studies.

I come from a background in soils (I studied Soil Science at the University of Aberdeen) and help to maintain the National Soils Database of Scotland and the National Soil Archive. The Institute continues to try and make both its data and samples more accessible to everybody, and I am in the process of working towards making our datasets compliant with the INSPIRE directive along with my colleagues Allan Lilly and David Donnelly.

Adam is interested in how new entrants navigate a variety of access barriers like capital, land, and compliance with agriucltural regulations. In particular, Adam seeks to understand how new entrant farmers are (un)able to hurdle the land access barrier as regimes of private property and balooning land costs make small scale agriculture an increasingly trying land use category.