William Salter

Dr William Salter is a Lecturer in Crop Physiology at the University of Sydney's School of Life and Environmental Sciences, based at the Narrabri Plant Breeding Institute. His research focuses on enhancing crop productivity and resilience through innovations in plant physiology, phenotyping technologies, and open-source agricultural tools. He leads a research group developing low-cost sensors and data pipelines for measuring plant traits like light use efficiency, canopy architecture, and weed detection.

• Education: BSc (Edinburgh) and PhD (Sydney)

Research interests include optimizing photosynthesis for food security, improving water/nutrient efficiency in crops, and adapting farming systems to climate change. His work prioritizes accessible, open-source solutions to democratize scientific tools.

Recent grants include studies on wheat heat tolerance and drought resilience. He advises students like Edward David on crop stress physiology projects. Collaborations involve the Sydney Institute of Agriculture and international partners.

Labs/Teams: Narrabri Plant Breeding Institute research group, International Centre of Crop and Digital Agriculture team.