Dr Rafal Gutaker is a plant evolutionary scientist specialising in ancient genomics, environmental change, and the long-term trajectories of crop diversity. He completed his PhD in Plant and Environmental Science at the University of Warwick (UK) and subsequently gained more than six years of postdoctoral experience at the Max Planck Institute (Germany) and New York University (USA). He then served for five years as a research leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (UK).
Across his career, Dr Gutaker has established himself as a leading expert in plant ancient genomics, pioneering innovative methods and analytical approaches that have advanced the field. He has also integrated comparative genomics with ecological and environmental perspectives, most notably through his research on rice–environment interactions over the past six thousand years, which has generated key insights into how environmental change shapes the geographical distribution of genetic diversity.
Dr Gutaker currently leads major research projects on the genomics of rice history and the domestication of millets, and supervises several fellowship projects examining long-term changes in plant diversity.
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