Caspar Chater

Caspar Chater’s research seeks to improve crop resilience and adaptation to the climate crisis. Chater’s work tackles crop water use and drought responses, focusing on legumes as well as other crops. He uses genomic, molecular, and phenotyping tools to understand plant development and physiology for crop improvement. His background is in stomatal evolutionary development, genetics, and signaling. Stomata are the microscopic pores on the surfaces of leaves that take up atmospheric carbon dioxide for photosynthesis and act as release valves for water through transpiration. By harnessing natural diversity in plant traits, such as stomatal density and size, he aims to help enhance sustainable legume agriculture for a hotter and drier world. A large part of Chatter’s research has a regional focus in Mexico and Latin America. He currently coordinates Newton Fund and Global Challenges Research Fund projects in collaboration with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the University of Sheffield. In addition to exploring crop genetic diversity, he hopes to use targeted molecular methods for pre-breeding underutilized crops and crop wild relatives. By doing so we can make full use of plant diversity to address increasing global food security and water security challenges.