Rate My Professor Caitlin Byrt

Byrt's research centers on membrane transporters and aquaporins, with applications in improving crop tolerance to abiotic stresses such as salinity and drought, advancing membrane separation technologies for nutrient and element recovery from complex solutions including wastewater, and supporting sustainable agriculture in space. She is the co-founder and Director of Membrane Transporter Engineers (MTE), a biotechnology startup that develops protein components for crop improvement and critical mineral processing. Her contributions include identifying stelar-localized transport proteins facilitating root-to-shoot chloride transfer and highly cited work on HKT1;5-like cation transporters linked to sodium exclusion in cereals. Key publications encompass 'Bioderived element resource separation technology for waste processing' (2025), 'Interactions of rare earth elements with living organisms and emerging biotechnical applications' (2025), 'Post-translational modification acts as a digital like switch influencing AtPIP2;1 water and cation permeability' (2025), 'A high-throughput yeast approach to characterize aquaporin permeabilities: Profiling the Arabidopsis PIP aquaporin sub-family' (2023), and 'Expression of a CO2-permeable aquaporin enhances mesophyll conductance in Arabidopsis thaliana' (2021). Byrt has been honored with the Jan Anderson Award (2023) from the ANU Research School of Biology, the Peter Goldacre Award from the Australian Society of Plant Scientists (2018), and the Winnovation Award in the Science category (2017). She also serves as a mission specialist with ANU InSpace, applying her expertise to plant survival in extraterrestrial environments.