Nic is a senior lecturer at The University of Western Australia, and has been a part of PEB since it began back in 2006. Other than a stint at the University of Oxford, Nic has been with UWA since moving from New Zealand to pursue his PhD in 2000. He has held positions within PEB as an ARC Future Fellow, ARC Post-Doctoral Fellow, and is now the head of his own lab.
The Taylor lab focuses on research to better our understanding of how metabolites, proteins and lipids influence yield, and how plant cells respond to extremes of temperature and salinity.
“I really hope that in some way my research can contribute to the global efforts to address global hunger, malnutrition and food security. I get excited by the new discoveries that my students and I make together, when that LED moment goes off and you both see the possible impacts of the data you are looking at, and how this influences our understanding of biology and the role it might play in food security.”
Nic’s career as a scientist grew out of a lifelong love of chasing down answers to questions that fascinated him.
“I have had a fascination with science for a long time, I grew moulds at primary school for a science project one year and did a comparative growth rate experiments for turf grasses in another year. My interest in how plants respond to their environment came about when I learned that if a homeotherm’s temperature changes by more than a few degrees it is life threatening due to breakdown of their cellular biochemistry but plants survive temperature changes of more than 30 ˚C in a single day. From that point on, I wanted to know why.
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