Rate My Professor Elizabeth Aitken

Professor Elizabeth Aitken obtained her BSc Hons in Agricultural Science (Crop Science) from the University of Edinburgh, where she specialised in plant pathology. She completed her PhD at the University of Aberdeen in conjunction with the UK Forestry Commission, focusing on dieback in Scots pine trees. This was followed by postdoctoral studies at the University of Birmingham and the Sainsbury Laboratory, where she worked on identifying a rust resistance gene through transposon tagging. In 1993, she joined the University of Queensland as an academic staff member and has since been appointed Professor of Plant Pathology in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability.

Her research at UQ has centred on diseases of tropical crops including banana, ginger, cotton and sunflower, with emphasis on the genetics of plant-pathogen interactions, molecular aspects of pathogenicity and disease diagnostics. This work, conducted in collaboration with the Queensland Department of Primary Industries and CSIRO, has contributed to the identification of disease incursions in banana and cryptic pathogen species in ginger and sunflower. Current projects include identifying resistance to Fusarium wilt in diploid banana lines for deployment against tropical race 4, analysis of putative pathogenicity genes such as Six genes in Fusarium oxysporum, and studies on Fusarium species in wheat in relation to climate change. She has supervised numerous postgraduate and honours students, taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in plant science, plant pathology and fungal biology, and served on committees related to postgraduate mentoring, research integrity and biosafety. She is a Fellow of the Australasian Plant Pathology Society.