Professor Andrew Smith

Professor of Plant Sciences

Andrew Smith is a Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Magdalen College.

He has special interests in plant adaptations to environmental stress, including studies of the impact of water deficits, salinity, and metal-rich soils on plant growth and productivity. He has undertaken extensive research on plant water-use in arid environments and is a leading authority on succulent plants and CAM photosynthesis, publishing widely on their ecology, evolution, physiology and metabolism.

His interests have expanded to investigating succulent plants as potential bioenergy crops in marginal environments, conducting the first complete life cycle analysis of such crops in collaboration with Prof. David King’s group at the Smith School. More recently, he has also contributed to annotation of the first fully sequenced genomes of succulent plants such as the pineapple in projects led by international consortia. He is the lead contact for Bioenergy in the Oxford Energy Network.