Rate My Professor Clive Ronson

Emeritus Professor Clive Ronson is a distinguished microbial geneticist in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Otago, part of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences. He earned his BSc from Massey University and PhD from the University of Warwick. Over a long career at Otago, Ronson held positions including Professor of Genetics, the first Director of the Genetics Teaching Programme, and Head of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. In 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi for his contributions as an international authority on Rhizobium genetics. He served as one of two international partners for the Centre for Carbohydrate Recognition and Signalling based in Denmark and recently retired from active duties while maintaining emeritus status. Ronson has supervised numerous doctoral students, including recipients of exceptional PhD thesis awards, and secured Marsden Fund grants, such as one in 2016 for research on gene silencing mechanisms in bacteria.

His research focuses on plant-microbe interactions, horizontal gene transfer, symbiotic nitrogen fixation by rhizobia, bacterial genetics, and genomics. Key discoveries include the role of symbiosis islands in rhizobial evolution and bacterial strategies for plant infection. Landmark publications encompass 'Evolution of rhizobia by acquisition of a 500-kb symbiosis island that is transferred between Mesorhizobium species' (Sullivan et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1998), 'Comparative sequence analysis of the symbiosis island of Mesorhizobium loti strain R7A' (Sullivan and Ronson, Journal of Bacteriology, 2002), 'Rhizobial secretion of truncated exopolysaccharides severely impairs the Mesorhizobium-Lotus symbiosis' (Wightman et al., Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, 2024), 'DUF2285 is a novel helix-turn-helix domain variant that orchestrates both activation and antiactivation of conjugative element transfer in proteobacteria' (Jowsey et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2023), and 'Symbiosis islands' (Ramsay et al., Reference Module in Life Sciences, 2023). Ronson's work, with over 10,000 citations, has profoundly shaped understanding of microbial symbiosis and gene mobility, fostering international collaborations in legume-rhizobia research.