Personal Chair: Maurizio Mencuccini

Professor Maurizio Mencuccini has been made Personal Chair in in Forest Science.

He is Professor of Forest Science at the School of GeoSciences in the College of Science & Engineering.

Professor Mencuccini obtained a first-class degree in Forest Science from the University of Florence.

He then completed his doctoral studies on the regulation of forest productivity by hydraulic constraints at the same university in 1995. Much of his field and laboratory work was carried out at Edinburgh as a visiting PhD student.

After studying hydraulic transport limitations to photosynthesis at Cornell University, he joined the University of Edinburgh in 1997.

He established his reputation for his work on xylem transport of water in tall trees and more recently for work leading to the development of an instrument measuring the velocity of sugar movement from leaves to roots in plant phloem.

Professor Mencuccini is currently leading an international collaborative initiative. This is aimed at establishing the sensitivity to drought and the phenotypic plasticity of forest trees in Mediterranean Europe in the face of climate change.

He is also leading a field experiment examining the effects of nitrogen deposition on the carbon sequestration of British forests at the catchment scale. This uses a combination of methods taken from micrometeorology, hydrology, soil science and stable isotope ecology.