 Who has a glass of wine in their hand tonight? Quite a few people, or had a quick snack before sitting down? I can see that everyone in the room, thankfully, is wearing clothes. All of these are dependent on a healthy soil. Although we might not think about the dirt beneath our feet very often, soil is actually a critical resource required to support and sustain life on Earth. Not only does it provide us with food and fibre, it also provides us with fuel crops. It plays a key role in climate regulation through carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas cycling. It provides us with pharmaceutical products. Streptomycin, which is used for the treatment of tuberculosis and other infections, was isolated from a soil bacterium. It plays a critical role in filtering our clean water and provides a source of construction materials for our cities and roads. But believe it or not, we're in a soil crisis. You see, it takes a really, really, really long time for soil to form from rock. It takes about a thousand years for just one centimetre of soil to form from a solid rock substrate. That process is influenced by a number of factors, including the climate under which it's forming, the kinds of organisms with which it's interacting, the type of rock that it's forming from. It's positioned in the landscape and of course the magical ingredient of time. There's currently no great way to fast-track this process of creating the soil that sustains life on Earth. And coupled with that are the challenges threatening our soil resource. Erosion is removing soil around 10 to 1,000 times faster than it forms. Degradation has already removed around 40% of our global soil from agricultural production. And when you couple these numbers with the fact that we have a growing global population and that we continue to lose soil through erosion and degradation, you can quickly see that we need to come up with ways to make new soil and upgrade our degraded soil and fast. That's where my group's research comes in. Much like Matt Damon did in The Martian, our research focuses on ways of using waste to create new soil and upgrade degraded soils. I work with byproducts from the mining industry such as waste rock and tailings with waste products from the agricultural industry such as crop residues and animal manures and even residues from our urban environments like sewage sludge and composted food scraps to tailor blends to upgrade degraded soils and even make brand new functional soils from crushed rock substrates. In doing so, I hope to preserve the productivity of our universally limited soil resource and keep us all in clothes, good food and most importantly, good wine. Thank you.