Genetics Society Medal 2016 – Ottoline Leyser

Ottoline Leyser is Professor of Plant Development and Director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Her research uses the control of shoot branching in Arabidopsis as a model system to understand plant developmental plasticity and the role of plant hormones in integrating endogenous and environmental inputs into development. She has made significant contributions to understand the signal transduction of the plant hormone auxin, as well as the more recently identified hormone, strigolactone. These discoveries underpin her main aim, which is to understand how local and systemic signaling mechanisms give rise to environmentally sensitive shoot system architectures. This work is increasingly dependent on computational modeling to understand the dynamic networks involved.