Rate My Professor Lee Hickey

Professor Lee Hickey is a plant breeder and crop geneticist serving as Professor in Plant Breeding and Genetics within the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation at the University of Queensland. He earned his PhD in 2012 from the University of Queensland on genomic regions controlling the expression of adult plant resistance to leaf rust, partial resistance to powdery mildew, and grain dormancy in a barley population. He also holds a Bachelor with Honours and a Postgraduate Diploma in Research Commercialisation from the same university. As an ARC Future Fellow and Director of the ARC Training Centre in Predictive Breeding, he leads a research group specializing in plant breeding innovation to develop more productive crops, including cereals such as wheat and barley, legumes like mungbean, chickpea, and pigeonpea, sugarcane, horticultural crops, and fibre crops. His research integrates breeding technologies including genomic prediction, artificial intelligence, speed breeding, and genome editing, with a focus on genetics of physiological traits like root system architecture, disease resistance, and genotype-by-environment interactions.

Professor Hickey has authored over 100 refereed publications in high-profile journals such as Nature Plants, Nature Protocols, and Nature Biotechnology. Key publications include "Speed breeding is a powerful tool to accelerate crop research and breeding" (2018), "Speed breeding in growth chambers and glasshouses for crop breeding and model plant research" (2018), "VERNALIZATION1 modulates root system architecture in wheat and barley" (2017), "Breeding crops to feed 10 billion" (2019), and "Satellite-enabled enviromics to enhance crop improvement" (2024). His speed breeding technology is adopted by plant breeding programs worldwide, fast-tracking improved crop varieties for farmers. He has received the ARC Future Fellowship, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award for developing lab-free genome editing systems, and the 2025 UQ Award for Excellence in Promoting Industry Engagement in Graduate Research. Hickey currently mentors 18 PhD students, with 20 previous graduates working for leading plant breeding companies and research institutes globally. His research has been featured in mainstream media including BBC World News, National Geographic, and the New York Times.