Rate My Professor Caitlin Byrt

Professor Caitlin Byrt is a Professor in the Division of Plant Sciences at the Research School of Biology, Australian National University College of Science and Medicine. She completed a Bachelor of Agricultural Science (Honours) at the University of Adelaide in 2004 and a PhD in plant science from the same university in 2008, with her thesis entitled 'Genes for sodium exclusion in wheat,' conducted at CSIRO’s Plant Industry Division in Canberra. Following her PhD, Byrt served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Newcastle, investigating plant sugar transport mechanisms, and later returned to the University of Adelaide for another postdoctoral position. In 2019, she joined the Australian National University as an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, where she now leads the Byrt Group focused on engineering plant membrane proteins and solute transport to increase yield security under challenging environmental conditions.

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.