Vice-Principal, Research
Professor Malcolm Campbell, a world-renowned leader in plant biology, was named vice-principal (research) at UTSC for a five-year term, effective August 1, 2-009.
Campbell is a leading expert in plant biology as well as an international authority on the regulation of gene expression in plants and the biochemical composition of plant matter. His research focuses on making sense of the instructions present within a plant ? its genome ? and how those instructions are turned into a functional organism. Recent studies have focused on finding ways to help plants better acclimate to global climate change, fix carbon, contend with drought and function as better sources of carbon in order to produce renewable energy in the form of biofuels. His research scope includes molecular biology and biotechnology, systems biology and bioinformatics, cell and developmental biology, functional genomics and genetics.
Born in Montreal, Campbell has a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Guelph and an MA (Oxon) from the University of Oxford. He worked in France for two years on an international research project funded by the European Union before moving to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He later joined the faculty at Oxford, where he developed his own research group in the department of plant sciences and earned a Teaching Excellence Award, the first for the 350-year-old department. Campbell has been at the University of Toronto since 2004.
Published widely, Campbell maintains connections with many scientific organizations and has various professional affiliations. He has guest lectured at dozens of institutions around the world and has supervised many doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. He has served on a number of scientific bodies, including the Canadian Society of Plant Physiology and the Institute of Forest Biotechnology. Campbell contributes as an editorial board member, reviewer and author for numerous journals. He has served on committees for one of Canada's key science granting agencies, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC), and is the recipient of multiple research grants.