Name: Graham Teakle

Job title: Assistant Professor

Department: School of Life Sciences

Number of years at Warwick: 20

There’s no such thing as a typical day, but, in brief, my job involves...

The diverse nature of my job makes it very interesting and varied. My time is divided between my research, which is mostly based at the Wellesbourne Campus, and teaching at Gibbet Hill.

My research interests are related to understanding how we can breed better crops (particularly vegetables and oilseed rape) and also new ways for how we can protect them from insect pests. I collaborate a lot with other members of the department and other organisations, which means quite a lot of meetings, data analysis, writing project proposals and scientific papers and so on. This has also led to working closely with the breeding industry and advisory roles with major funding organisations. I sometimes manage some hands-on research which might involve working in the field or glasshouse, or even occasionally some lab work.

Teaching takes up quite a bit of my time, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and includes supervising PhD students. I have also been a senior tutor for several years where I provide pastoral support for students.

In my time at Warwick, the biggest change I’ve seen is...

The Wellesbourne Campus where I started work was formerly the headquarters of Horticulture Research International, which also comprised five additional sites around the UK, and was the government organisation tasked with R&D to support the UK horticulture sector. Funding pressures led to the organisation being broken up and in 2004 the Wellesbourne site was taken over by the University, initially as a department in its own right, but subsequently merging with Biological Sciences in 2010 to form the School of Life Sciences.

Warwick's kept me here because...

I really enjoy the ability to combine research in applied crop science with teaching at multiple levels, especially building a rapport with students.

At the moment I'm really enjoying working on...

I will cherry pick one of the projects I work on for this. We have just started a new BBSRC project in which we aim to use a novel strategy of combining partial crop resistance to a major aphid pest of brassicas in order to improve the efficacy of biocontrol agents so that they can be used more effectively for sustainable integrated pest management of crops.

This is a highly multidisciplinary project in which I provide genetics expertise, but it also involves entomologists at Wellesbourne and collaborators at Harper Adams, Keele and Durham Universities and ADAS. The project will address the growing issue caused by the recent withdrawal of many agricultural pesticides over health and environmental concerns and pests developing resistance to those that are still available.

It would be really useful to work more closely with...

The departments I would most like to establish collaborations with are Chemistry and Engineering, as this could open up opportunities to extend the research we are doing into new areas.

I recently learnt that...

The University are putting some serious thought into how to develop the Wellesbourne site, now known as the Wellesbourne Innovation Campus, for the future.

Warwick’s unique because...

For me as a plant scientist Warwick is great because we have such a depth in plant science research and a wide range of facilities to support our work from fundamental 'omics' labs to applied field scale trials.

I usually travel to campus by...

As I live about 15 miles from the University I usually travel to campus by car. However, if I can get my bike in working order, I might be tempted to cycle on dry days which will be great for my fitness.

If I could change one thing at the University, it would be...

The traffic queues getting in and out of campus (OK I would reduce them if I was on my bike!)

The best thing about working at Warwick is...

It’s all the excellent people I work with that makes a difference to working at Warwick.

My favourite place on campus is...

For me there is no competition in this respect as I am largely based at the Wellesbourne campus (now the location of Warwick Crop Centre) which, in addition to the offices and experimental facilities, has several hundred acres of lovely farmland.

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