Rate My Professor Onoriode Coast

Dr Onoriode Coast is a Senior Lecturer in Crop Science in the School of Environmental and Rural Science at the University of New England. With a PhD in Crop Physiology from the University of Reading and a Bachelor of Agriculture (First Class Honours) in Crop Science from the University of Benin, Coast brings extensive expertise to his role. His career includes previous appointments as Senior Research Fellow at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, UK (2020-2021), Research Fellow at the Australian National University (2016-2020), and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CSIRO. These positions have equipped him with a strong foundation in crop research and physiology.

Coast's primary research interests encompass abiotic stress tolerance in crops, with a particular emphasis on the thermal acclimation of photosynthesis and respiration and their implications for crop yield and quality. He also focuses on horticultural science, protected cropping systems, high-throughput phenotyping of plant traits, and applied remote sensing. As leader of the Crop Physiology and Production group, he supervises several higher degree research students investigating topics such as acclimation of leaf photosynthesis and respiration to nocturnal warming in wheat, high temperature stress tolerance in wheat cultivars, drivers of pasture physiology in tree-pasture systems, and managing CO2 in controlled environment cropping. Key publications authored or co-authored by Coast include: "Photosynthesis in newly-developed leaves of heat-tolerant wheat acclimates to long-term nocturnal warming" (Journal of Experimental Botany, 2024); "Twenty-five rice research priorities to achieve sustainable rice systems by 2050" (Global Sustainability, 2024); "Cyanide in cassava: Understanding the drivers, impacts of climate variability, and strategies for food security" (Food & Energy Security, 2023); "Wheat photosystem II heat tolerance responds dynamically to short and long-term warming" (Journal of Experimental Botany, 2022); "Compound heat and moisture extreme impacts on global crop yields under climate change" (Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 2022); and "Wheat leaf dark respiration acclimates more strongly at night than in the day when responding to nocturnal warming" (2026). Coast teaches courses such as AGRO200: Agricultural Plants: Adaptation and Physiology, HORT420: Horticultural Science and Management, BOTY505: Plant Responses to a Changing World, and QMER100: Foundational Quantitative Methods for Environmental and Rural Sciences. His broad international collaborations span Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania.