John Mackie Christie PhD

John Christie currently holds a professorship in Photobiology at the University of Glasgow (UK) and acts as Co-Deputy Director for the Institute of Molecular, Cell and Systems Biology. He has extensive experience in studying how plant growth and development are regulated by light. John obtained his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow in 1996 before moving to the Carnegie Institution of Science at Stanford (USA) for his postdoctoral work with Winslow Briggs. He returned to Glasgow in 2002 to take up a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and continue his work on UV/blue light signaling in plants. He received the New Investigator of the Year Award from the American Society for Photobiology (2003), was awarded the Finsen Lecture Award from the International Congress of Photobiology (2009), and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016. His research has resulted in major advances in the field of photobiology, including the identification of the long-sought-after photoreceptor for phototropism, phototropin, and the elusive UV-B photoreceptor UVR8. His work has also generated new technologies derived from plant photoreceptors, including new fluorescent reporters and synthetic optogenetic tools to artificially control ion fluxes.