Research News

Tim Wheeler, Professor of Agriculture at Reading University, has been appointed Deputy Chief Scientific Advisor and Deputy Director of Research & Evidence Division at the Department for International Development (DFID). Tim has a world-wide reputation in agricultural research in developing countries and the impact of climate change on agriculture. His experience will help DFID build on its increasingly strong science and research capacity.

Tim has over 20 years' experience of research on how climate affects crops. This has included using novel techniques to examine the effects of carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures on crop plants. His research has been cited in all the major climate change assessments of the last decade: the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Assessments of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, and the World Bank Development Report, 2008.

Much of Tim's research has addressed challenges to developing country agriculture, from projects providing underpinning science on the use of cover crops for sustainable potato cropping systems in Bolivia and combating banana streak virus in small-holder plantations in Uganda, to those that promoted the uptake of research, such as improving awareness of aflatoxin contamination through participatory approaches in the groundnut food chain in India. A recent review assessed the vulnerability of food crop systems in Africa to climate change. These projects, as well as others in China, the Gambia, Honduras and Malawi, have given him a thorough grounding in tropical farming systems and in the role of science and technology in the development of these farming communities.

Tim has over 150 scientific publications to date. Some examples of his refereed journal publications from the last five years are listed here.