Joy Ojo is a PhD candidate at the School of Environmental and Rural Science, University of New England (UNE) in Armidale. Her PhD project, “Phenotyping for Heat Tolerance in Crops: Using Novel Tools to Find Novel Traits,” focuses on the development of innovative high-throughput tools for characterising new traits in non-leaf plant parts. Joy is particularly excited about this project because it allows her to use advanced technologies like hyperspectral sensing, machine learning, and robotics to develop models for estimating photosynthetic and respiratory traits in non-leaf plant parts like wheat spikes and roots. These tools will be applicable to other plants, and aid in determining how non-leaf plant parts contribute to the overall crop resilience to heat stress. Joy’s supervisory team includes Dr Onoriode Coast (UNE), Professor Romina Rader (UNE), and Dr Jayakumar Bose (Western Sydney University).
Joy is a recipient of a Future Food Systems CRC top-up scholarship and is also funded through UNE’s Tuition Fee Scholarship and a GRDC project on improving intrinsic heat tolerance of wheat through improved genetics.
