Alison Mary Smith
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| Alison Smith | |
|---|---|
| Born | Alison Mary Smith 1954 (age 69–70)[1] |
| Institutions | <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/> |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (PhD) |
| Thesis | Effect of anaerobiosis on plant metabolism (1978) |
| Notable awards | <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/> |
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Alison Mary Smith (born 1954)[1] FRS[4] is Strategic Programme Leader at the John Innes Centre in Norwich and an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in the UK.[2]
Education
Smith was educated at the University of Cambridge where she was awarded a PhD in 1978 for research into the effect of anaerobiosis on plant metabolism.[5]
Research
Smith studies the metabolism in plants of starch and sucrose – the carbohydrate products of photosynthesis that fuel plant growth. Her research has uncovered metabolic pathways responsible for the synthesis and degradation of starch granules in plants. She showed that these processes in leaves are subject to complex control by the circadian clock over the day-night cycle, ensuring the availability of carbohydrate to fuel metabolism during the night. Her focus is now on the mechanisms underlying this control, and the way in which carbohydrate availability is integrated with other sources of information to determine rates and patterns of growth and development in plants.[4][6][7]
Smith uses information from her fundamental studies to examine starch turnover in crop plants. Current research on starch synthesis in cereal grains has the potential to increase crop yield, and to change important functional and nutritional properties of flour.[4]
With George Coupland, Liam Dolan, Nicholas Harberd, Jonathan D. G. Jones, Cathie Martin, Robert Sablowski and Abigail Amey she is a co-author of the textbook Plant Biology.[2]
Awards and honours
Smith was appointed Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to plant biochemistry in the 2006 Birthday Honours[3] and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016.[4]
Personal life
Alison Smith is the daughter of conservation pioneer Ted Smith,[citation needed] and the sister of arachnologist Dr Helen Smith.[citation needed]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Alison Mary Smith at Library of Congress Authorities, with catalog records
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 58014. p. 12. 2006-06-17.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: <templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" />
“All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Alison Mary Smith's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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