Rate My Professor Michael Tausz

Professor Michael Tausz serves as Professor and Director of the Victoria Drought Resilience Adoption and Innovation Hub (VdRAIH) within the School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, Faculty of Science, at the University of Melbourne. He assumed this role in 2022, rejoining the institution after five years abroad at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research at the University of Birmingham (UK), Central Queensland University in Rockhampton, and the University of Queensland. Earlier in his career, Tausz held positions at the University of Melbourne, including in the School of Forest and Ecosystem Science, where he was awarded a University of Melbourne Research Grant (AU$30,000) from 2002 to 2006. A plant physiologist by training, he earned his PhD in plant physiology from the University of Graz, Austria, in 1997, and served as a Fulbright Scholar at the USDA Forest Service in Riverside, California, in 1999.

Tausz's research specializes in the physiological responses of plants to environmental stresses, particularly elevated atmospheric CO2, drought, and heat, with applications to crop production systems such as wheat, canola, and lentils, as well as forest ecosystems. His work explores tree physiology, sustainable agriculture, and climate resilience strategies to enhance productivity under changing climates. He has produced over 250 peer-reviewed publications, accumulating more than 10,000 citations. Notable contributions include co-authorship on 'Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition' (Nature, 2014), which highlighted nutritional declines in crops under rising CO2; 'Moderate heat stress prevented the observed biomass and yield stimulation caused by elevated CO2 in two well-watered wheat cultivars' (Plant Molecular Biology, 2022); 'Benefits of increasing transpiration efficiency in wheat under elevated CO2 for rainfed regions' (Global Change Biology, 2018); 'Does elevated [CO2] only increase root growth in the topsoil? A FACE study with lentil in a semi-arid environment' (Plants, 2021); and editorship of the book 'Trees in a Changing Environment' (Springer, 2016). Through leadership of the VdRAIH, Tausz advances long-term economic, environmental, and social outcomes of drought-resilient practices in mixed farming systems, contributing significantly to agricultural adaptation to climate change.