Areas of interest
Grains play a central role in human nutrition, with cereals and pulses providing the bulk of energy and protein to the global food supply’, but also representing an important source of dietary fibre and micronutrients to western diets, and therefore promoting human health.
My main research interests focus on the deposition of storage compounds in grain of cereals (particularly wheat) and pulses (particularly faba bean), combining research into seed/grain development and storage organelles and tissues biogenesis with the biochemistry of ripening and how this impact on nutritional and processing quality. The development of cereal and pulses crops with improved quality and stability, able to perform well also in the increasingly challenging environments predicted by climate change, requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms controlling the synthesis, trafficking and deposition of seed storage compounds and of how these mechanisms are influenced by genotype and environment.
A large part of my research has focused on the deposition kinetics of storage proteins (Warsame et al 2020; Warsame et al 2022; Tosi et al 2009; Tosi et al 2011., Oszvald et al 2014) and of cell wall components (Pellny et al 2011; Shewry et al 2012; Lovegrove et al 2013), how this relates to the development and differentiation of the various seed tissues (Kino et al 2020) and to the composition and chemical and physical characteristics of the mature grains (Richard, R. et al 2025, Lovegrove et al 2020; He et al., 2013).
Increasingly the emphasis of my research is on how environmental effects (biotic and abiotic stresses, crop nutritional inputs) impact on grain processing quality and nutritional characteristics. I have supervised to completion over ten PhD students, including CASE projects, and led or collaborated to both industry and government funded research projects. I am currently work package lead for Raising the Pulse ( TUKFS-UKRI).
After a 5 year Master degree in Agricultural Sciences at University of Tuscia ( Italy), I completed my PhD on the role of low molecular weight glutenin subunits (LMW-GS) in durum wheat gluten functional properties in 2001, at University of Bristol (UK), under the supervision of Prof Peter Shewry.
Following this, I worked for 12 years, initially as a post-doctoral researcher and then as a senior researcher, at Rothamsted Research, carrying out research aimed at understanding various aspects of wheat processing quality, such as the biochemical basis for grain hardness, the relationship between the patterns of deposition and distribution of gluten protein within the endosperm and gluten quality and the role of deposition kinetics of fibre within the grain tissues and grain development..
I joined the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development at University of Reading in 2013, as a Senior Research Fellow within the Crop Science Department, and become Associate Professor within this Department in 2022.
