Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize 2023/24 Nick Fradgley

The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Dr Nick Fradgley as the winner of the 2023/24 Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize.

It is a great honour to receive the Sir Kenneth Mather Memorial Prize for my PhD research project. Many thanks to the Genetics Society and my supervisors; especially Alison Bentley who nominated me for this award.

My PhD project was based at NIAB and the University of Cambridge and the thesis title was ‘Genetic control and prediction of milling and baking quality for UK wheat breeding’. The project explored applying quantitative genetics tools and models in the commercial DSV UK wheat breeding programme to improve the prediction and selection of wheat milling and baking quality traits.

Since graduating, I completed a short project with the CIMMYT wheat breeding programme in Mexico and have moved to Australia to start a postdoctoral fellowship at CSIRO where I am modelling genotype by environment interactions in long-term wheat multi-environment trial datasets to understand and predict adaption to variable Australian growing environments.