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Professor Owen Atkin
Contacts
Owen Atkin obtained his BSc (Hons) in 1987 (ANU) and his PhD in 1993 (Toronto). From 1993-1995 he held an EU Post Doctoral Fellowship (Utrecht). From 1996-1999 he held an ARC Post Doctoral Fellowship at the ANU.
Thereafter, he moved to UK to take up a faculty position in the Biology Dept at the University of York (1999-2008). He then returned to the ANU in 2008, was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship in 2009 and promoted to Professor in 2010. From 2014-2021, he was a Chief Investigator within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Energy Biology.
In 2017, Prof. Atkin became Head of the Division of Plant Sciences in the Research School of Biology at ANU. In 2019, he was appointed as Vice Chancellor's Entrepreneurial Professor at ANU, and became the Director of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Agri-Technology (CEAT) - a collaboration between ANU and CSIRO, with investment from the ACT Government. From 2022-2023, Prof. Atkin was also Director of the ANU node of the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility; he led the formation of the University’s successful application as part of the next cycle of NCRIS funding. In 2024, he became Director of the ANU Agrifood Innovation Institute.
A major focus of Prof. Atkin's research is assessing the impact of environmental gradients on plant physiological processes, particularly respiration. He has been an Editor for New Phytologist since 2007.
Research interests
Much of Prof. Atkin’s research has centred on plant carbon metabolism, conducted at a range of scales (organelle, cell, organ, whole plant, landscape, global). He has used the genetic diversity of plants among ecosystems to explore factors regulating photosynthesis and respiration and applied this knowledge across wide spatial and temporal scales. How temperature affects leaf carbon metabolism has been a feature of his work, with two approaches having been taken.
Firstly, short and long-term manipulations of temperature in controlled environments have been used to investigate biochemical, physiological and morphological responses of plants; this includes detailed characterisation of responses of respiration and photosynthesis to extreme heat.
Secondly, investigating evolutionary solutions - from adaptation to contrasting habitats - has revealed how temperature – particularly heat – influences leaf carbon exchange. By combining these approaches with field research in many ecosystems around the world, Prof. Atkin has established the ecological relevance of temperature-mediated variations in photosynthesis and respiration.
Over the past decade, he has engaged with climate modellers to improve the representation of plant carbon exchange in global climate models.
More recently, Prof. Atkin has used his understanding of plant carbon exchange in the natural world, combined with his lab’s advances in high-throughput measurements linked to hyperspectral analyses, to provide industry with new tools to screen for cereal energy use efficiency. He is also using these tools to improve predictions of day-to-day variations in C-exchange in a wide range of diverse plant species.
Groups
- Researcher, Agriculture, food and nutritional security
- Researcher, Carbon removal
- Researcher, Extreme events and future scenarios
- Researcher, Water and flooding