Alison Smith

Alison Smith is Professor of Plant Biochemistry in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK, where she teaches undergraduates in Natural Sciences, and runs a research group funded by BBSRC, Innovate UK and EU FP7. Her research interests are focussed around the metabolism of plants, algae and bacteria, in particular of vitamins and cofactors, and of lipid precursors for chemicals and biofuels. As well as developing strategies for metabolic engineering of algae, she has been instrumental in advocating the use of microbial consortia for optimizing growth of dense algal cultures for industrial cultivation. She is a founding member of the Algal Biotechnology Consortium (ABC), the interests of which are in exploiting algae for example for biomass and biodiesel production, and remediation of waste streams including water and CO2.

Alison is a member of the BBSRC Industrial Biotechnology Strategy Panel, and the Management Boards of two BBSRC-EPSRC-Innovate UK Networks in Industrial Biotechnology. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, where she has been Director of Studies in Biology, Admissions Tutor for Science, and a member of the Executive Body. From 2001-2015 she was a Council member of the Council of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, a charity aimed at promoting science, and its President 2010-2011. She is currently a Governor on the Council of the Marine Biological Association of the UK, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2012.