Associate Professor Miranda Mortlock

Research Theme Convenor in Food Agility CRC

BSc(Hons) Agriculture, MSc Applied Plant Sciences, PhD Agronomy and Statistics

Associate Professor Miranda Mortlock joined QUT in February and is working as a Research Theme Convenor in Food Agility CRC. Food Agility is using the power of digital to improve sustainability in the agri-business sector, showcasing innovation and the benefits of sharing of data to help industry meet future challenges.

Associate Professor Miranda Mortlock has experience in research and tertiary training in agriculture and research. Originally from England she and has a doctorate in agronomy from Kansas State University.  She has experience in agricultural research and agricultural development in three continents. Recently she has developed workshops for R Software for experimental design and statistics. She spent several years in Africa and was employed in the Department of Agricultural Research in Government of Botswana and as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Botswana.

Miranda has worked with the agronomy sector and grains industry to identify research projects, plan and conduct experiments and supervise HDR students. She won two competitive postdoctoral fellowships for agronomy, both undertaken at the University of Queensland School of Agriculture. After this she joined Queensland Treasury where she managed the biannual Queensland Household omnibus survey and took secondments into various departments and to two public hospitals as a Research Fellow in an ARC Linkage grant. As a Principal Advisor in Queensland government   she coordinated many projects in research and development and developed monitoring and evaluation frameworks for government projects such as community renewal and state legislation. She is an Accredited Statistician in Australia, where she currently serves as the President of the Statistical Society of Australia (Queensland Branch). She is a Chartered Statistician with the Royal Society of Statistics, UK. She taught biometry at the University of Queensland and received two Teaching and Learning awards with which she built a website called ’Ploughing through Biometry’ and produced a number of films with links in the website (http://shoutout.wix.com/so/cKoisYqD#/main.

She was also invited by Australian Centre for Agricultural Research (ACIAR) to build a website to provide support material for early career researchers in Africa learning R statistical software and using it for design and analysis of experiments (see the website yieldingresults.org).  This ‘BeST’ website is freely available as a support for self-directed study and is used by early career researchers widely in Africa and Asia.

Miranda is secretary for Graduate Women Queensland (GWQ) which has a few seminars each year and mainly provides fellowships for female graduates; she also serves as a representative of GWQ on eS4W (Economic Security for Women).  She is a member of the UK Tropical Agricultural Association (TAA).