Malcolm Bennett was born in north Wales into a nonscientific family. His early passion was history but, inspired by his biology teacher at high school, he went on to study biochemistry and molecular biology at Manchester University (then UMIST) from 1982 to 1985. After completing his PhD at the University of Warwick (1989), he won a NATO Fellowship to study at the University of Arizona in Tucson, before starting his own research group at Warwick in 1993. He was appointed Chair of Plant Sciences at the University of Nottingham in 1998. Understanding the ‘hidden half’ of plant biology has been an enduring interest throughout his career. Over the past 10 years, he has used systems approaches to study hormone-regulated root development, helping to establish the Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB), of which he is currently the Director. BBSRC Professorial Fellowship, ERC Advanced Investigator, and Wolfson-Royal Society awards have recently enabled him to build a multidisciplinary research team and state-of-the-art computed tomography (CT) facility to image root architecture in soil noninvasively to finally uncover the ‘hidden half’ of plant biology.
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