Providing close support to the California statewide program to contain citrus HLB: a case study in applied interdisciplinary science

Dr Neil McRoberts is an interdisciplinary scientist in the Plant Pathology Department at the University of California, Davis.  He grew up in Scotland in a small rural town about 40 miles north of Edinburgh.  He has a BSc. degree in Crop Science and a PhD in Plant Pathology, both from the University of Edinburgh.  From 1990 to 2010 he was a research team leader at the Scottish Agricultural College where he worked on a range of issues in plant disease management, farm sustainability and agriculture policy; mostly in collaboration with the bit of the James Hutton Institute that used to be the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute.  In 2010 he joined the faculty at UC Davis and started working on a range of biosecurity and crop health problems in California and US agriculture.  Neil’s group works closely with Prof Mark Lubell in the Center for Environmental Policy & Behavior on cooperation problems in agriculture and has continued the work he started in Scotland on developing approaches for better integration of social science methods into epidemiology and crop management research.  A major focus for his group currently is to provide expert knowledge and analytical capacity for the statewide regulatory response to the threat of huanglongbing (HLB) disease in citrus. Neil teaches an undergraduate class in epidemiology and graduate classes in statistics and opinion/attitude data analysis.  He is a member of the UC IPM state-wide program and is the Western Region Director of the National Plant Diagnostic Network.

This is a public seminar.

Open-access to The CSIRO Discovery Theatre @ Black Mountain