 The world needs to produce more food and produce it more efficiently as the global population increases. To achieve this, we have to move into marginal lands that are not productive yet, lands that have challenges for the stresses that they place on plants, climatic stresses, soil stresses. Research that my colleagues and I do will help us come up with systems that are more efficient and that will work in the marginal lands that are going to have to be mined for agriculture in order to cope with the changes in climate and population. This sort of research should climate proof is to some extent. The big thing is climate variability and if you can breed plants that can enable farmers to deal with climate variability, then I think that's the main challenge that will see us through climate change itself. A&U is the best place in the world to work on the plant physiology that deals with plant growth, plant water use and photosynthesis. And I've benefited from that combination of top people and top facilities. Most of the students that I deal with are PhD students and they're certainly a great source of new ideas. But I'm always interested in dealing with the undergraduates that I teach in global change biology and they often come up with interesting questions and frame things in a way that I wouldn't have thought of. And so it is a stimulating aspect of academic life at the A&U. And of course it's quite exciting because there are some good students that have backgrounds that are diverse backgrounds in physics, chemistry, mathematics as well as biology. And it's that mix that you get at the A&U that is so powerful.