Jenny Mortimer is Professor of Plant Synthetic Biology in the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine at Adelaide University (AU), where she is also Deputy Director of the AU Waite Research Institute. She holds an Affiliate Staff Scientist position at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. Her team’s research centres on understanding and manipulating plant cell metabolism, particularly complex glycosylation and the cell wall, to develop the tools, knowledge and crops that underpin a sustainable bioeconomy.
She holds several senior roles in research consortia, including as Chief Investigator and AU node lead for the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Plants for Space (P4S). P4S is an interdisciplinary, seven-year centre developing plants to support long-distance space exploration, alongside closed-environment agriculture and synthetic biology driven biomanufacturing on Earth.
Her team also collaborates on a UK Space Agency/ASA-funded project to develop an autonomous plant growth facility for Axiom Station, an NSF-funded project to develop on station plant-based biomanufacturing (EPiC), and a NASA-funded project (LEAF, Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora), an Artemis deployed instrument that will germinate and grow plants on the lunar surface and return samples to Earth for analysis, including in her lab here in Adelaide.

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