Principles of Tropical Agronomy

Professor Sayed Azam-Ali BSc (Hons), PhD is the Chief Executive Officer of Crops for the Future Research Centre (CFFRC) the world's first centre research on underutilised plants for food and non-food uses. He is also the Chair in Global Food Security at the University of Nottingham. After his first degree in Plant Biology at the University of Wales, Professor Azam-Ali completed his PhD in Environmental Physics at the University of Nottingham in 1983. He then worked as a plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), India, returning to Nottingham where he became Professor of Tropical Agronomy in 2006. At Nottingham, Professor Azam-Ali co-ordinated three major EU-funded Programmes on bambara groundnut and was a principal partner in two other EU programmes. He was also Principal Investigator for six UK DFiD projects that included bambara groundnut. In 2008, Professor Azam-Ali was appointed as Vice-Provost (Research and Internationalisation) at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus and in 2011 became founding CEO of Crops For the Future Research Centre (CFFRC), the world's first centre for research solely on the world's underutilised and forgotten crops. In 2020 he became CEO of Crops For the Future (CFF) based in Cambridge, UK. Sayed Azam-Ali is a past Chair of the Association of International Research and Development Centers for Agriculture. In 2021 he was awarded an OBE for 'services to underutilised crops and increasing global food security' in the Queen's New Year's Honours List.