Hello {{first_name | everyone}}!
Through the newsletter, I’ve had the chance to speak with remarkable scientists from around the world. Many of these conversations have offered valuable insights into how people build careers in plant pathology.
Today, I’m very happy to bring you the final conversation of 2026, a one-on-one with my wonderful PhD supervisor, Peri Tobias.
For as long as I have known Peri, she has funded her own research position at the University of Sydney.
While this may sound daunting to many, it has enabled Peri to pursue her own research projects and collaborate with researchers worldwide.
My key insights from this conversation were:
Peri’s path into plant science was distinctly non-linear: she left an arts degree after a year, discovered a love of plants in London’s Royal Parks, and built a career in horticulture, arboriculture and local government before ever calling herself a scientist.
She deliberately prioritised raising her two sons in their early years, worked in a “very family-friendly” council role, and only returned to full-time university science about 16 years later, when her eldest was in Year 11 or 12.
Since her PhD, she has effectively secured her own funding by “going from grant to grant,” building collaborations and leading industry-funded projects (from myrtle rust genomics to cacao vascular streak dieback) that have supported her positions even without a traditional, secure academic role.
Unfortunately, I do not have a recording available right now, as we recorded outside to the noise of a leaf blower for most of the interview (rookie mistake … I know!). I hope to clean up the audio over the Christmas break and will release it then.
In the meantime, enjoy a summary of my conversation with Peri!
Leaving arts and finding horticulture
Peri’s first experience of university was brief.
“I did start university after high school, and I started a Bachelor of Arts, which I did a year of and decided it wasn’t for me.”
After that, she “went off track” and did something very different: she moved to the UK and took a job as a gardener in London’s Royal Parks.
“It was really fantastic and kind of made me very excited about plants,” she explains. That excitement turned into a decision. “I resolved to come back to Australia and study horticulture, which I did,” she says. She went on to study both horticulture and arboriculture, and then worked “at the Botanic Gardens as a gardener.” After that, she became an arborist.
“I worked as an arborist, so I did the climbing trees with a chainsaw, which was pretty wild,” she says with a laugh.
From arboriculture, she moved into a specialist role in local government.
“From there, being an arborist, I ended up getting a job as a Tree Preservation Office at a local council. That’s a pretty specific role where you go and inspect trees to decide if they can be pruned or removed based on various criteria.”
Working, parenting and noticing tree illness
Even while juggling work and parenting, Peri’s interest in plant health continued to deepen.
“The whole time I was very interested in trees and in vegetation and my observations around pathology, I guess, or trees’ illness.”
Working as a Tree Preservation Officer brought that into sharp focus. She was often in older suburbs with “a lot of remnant trees that had been retained in old gardens,” and she saw how differently they responded to stress.
“Some of those species were just falling down, but then other trees seem to be incredibly resilient. And so it kind of just made me interested in what makes some trees able to cope.”
That question sat with her and eventually drew her back towards university science.
Going back to science 16 years later
The return to university came much later, after a 16-year gap from starting that first degree.
“My oldest son was in Year 11 or 12 in high school, and I went back to university full-time. I dropped my full-time job and went back to university full-time to study science.”
Starting in science after that kind of break meant stepping into a changed landscape, yet for Peri, the shift was inspiring.
“It was pretty exciting because things like genomics was fairly new. A lot of the tools that we use currently were being kind of developed and invented, and so it just opened my eyes about how we can answer questions. That was very exciting.”
Peri did her undergraduate degree at Macquarie University, which did not offer a plant pathology course. She instead made the most of an immunobiology course and genetics and molecular biology course, which allowed her to steer herself towards content related to plant immunity.
“My whole degree, I tried to focus on some plant and on molecular plant biology, and, you know, genomics interested me. I found value in that course because it covered plants, invertebrates, vertebrates, and highlighted a lot of conserved domains that are reused in various immune responses.”
Honours: “It’ll be easy!”
The observations she had been making for years about tree health and resilience eventually turned into a formal research project.
“Yeah, so then I thought, ‘Oh, I know, I’ll go and do an honours degree, I’ll look at RNASeq, it’ll be easy!’” she says, laughing at her own past optimism. “‘I’ll find the genes that are expressed in diseased plants compared to the genes expressed in resistant plants. Simple!’”
Her honours project focused on myrtle rust disease in the flooded gum, Eucalyptus grandis.
“The reason I picked that was because that was the first Myrtaceae we did the genome for. For this work, I didn’t do RNAseq, I just did RT-PCR and I actually looked at chitinases in that system. There were some differential expressions in those chitinases, which I guess was to be expected.”
Her PhD largely extended in this direction when Peri began to dive into RNAseq with help from industry funding.
“So then, I really kind of focused on RNAseq, and I had some industry funding. RDC funding. I had a few actually additional bits of top-up that I was using too. So that led me to focus on a particular couple of plants, really, that were of use commercially and agriculturally.”
Creating post-PhD work through grants
The path from PhD to her next role was not a simple jump into a ready-made postdoc.
“I was partly still being funded by Robert Park because he had an interest in getting a genome together for the myrtle rust pathogen and asked if I would be interested in working on that. That kind of took a fair bit of groundwork just doing some flow cytometry and various things to understand the potential genome size.”
From there, she focused on tapping into her already established and growing network, and the workload expanded quickly.
“From there, things snowballed because I met a few people in New Zealand and they’re trying to get a genome as well, at Plant and Food, and also I met people at ANU. It kind of built into quite a large collaboration where I was staff partly employed by Plant and Food New Zealand and partly by Sydney Uni.”
At the same time, she was writing a major grant application to the Australian Research Council to fund her ongoing myrtle rust research and, importantly, her own position.
“At that same time I was putting together a Linkage project, which was going to fund me hopefully. So that was next step, to write the Linkage. So that was concurrent [with working at USyd], writing the Linkage.”
She notes that ARC is “one of our funding sources in Australia,” and that it helped to “go into it” with collaborations already in place.
“It was good… I had those links already, so I built those links.”
“I basically go from grant to grant”
Since the Linkage Project funding, Peri has secured various grants to support her research and position at the University of Sydney.
“Yeah, I basically go from grant to grant, applying for funding, and, yeah, I’ve managed to so far make things work.”
Part of her decision to apply for funding to continue her position at USyd stems from her life stage and family commitments.
“It’s partly because I was older, I wasn’t prepared to give up and move around the world. I have family and so it was really just about fitting the work, my interests and my work around where I want to be physically, you know, geographically. And, I think that’s how I’ve made it work.”
That strategy has had consequences. On the one hand, it has made it harder to stay directly on myrtle rust. On the other hand, it has opened new directions in her research.
Moving into cacao and vascular streak dieback
Peri’s current main project also grew from industry connections and long-standing relationships.
“So again working with industry, working with European Cocoa Association. Again, writing a sort of an invited proposal with David Guest, who has had a long career in working in cacao. And I’ve worked with David on other projects, published with him.”
Together, they developed a project “to investigate resistance to vascular streak dieback in Southeast Asia.
“That was successful and that was quite competitive too. That funded initial work to build the genomes of a cacao plant from Indonesia, and then further work to actually do some deep analysis of the resistance genes. So that’s where that led and that’s what I’m doing now.”
Vascular streak dieback, she notes, “is currently confined to Southeast Asia, we believe.” Her team is “trying to work out if there are strain differences of this actual pathogen, which is Rhizoctonia theobromae, formerly or synonymous with Ceratobasidium theobromae.” The pathogen “seems to be occurring on other plants like cassava,” and their in-progress data “looks to show some variation there.”
“Once we had a really good genome, it was great because we could see that there’s actually heterozygosity at these NLRs. That allowed us to design primers to span the full gene, and we sequence full genes. We built a pipeline now, a bioinformatic pipeline to identify allelic variants, and then to output a consensus read for sequence from the heterozygous starting point.”
Peri has been utilising Oxford Nanopore Technologies benchtop sequencing to conduct amplicon work. In the pathogen, they are looking at amplicons around the mating region and also a couple of other regions.
She has also had a go at some 3D printing of her NLR genes, with her family sharing a little laugh over her enthusiasm for a 3D model!
“To see that pentamer was really exciting and to see it in 3D – that’s AlphaFold plus 3D printing.”
Peri is clear that cacao is both scientifically interesting and socially important.
“It’s a high-value crop. So it’s a very important crop, but it’s mostly grown by smallholder farmers, and it’s grown in parts of the world where there aren’t many resources. That’s the problem.”
She points to a partner university in Makassar, Indonesia, noting “they’re limited to what they can do at that end. But we have great facilities in our labs so we’re kind of working together with them.”
For her, this kind of collaboration is central.
“I think there’s a huge untapped resource. There are people with huge on-the-ground knowledge about their crops. That’s always the case with farmers – they know absolutely everything about their crops. Researchers might have grown up on a farm, so now they’re a research scientist. They’ve got all that background knowledge.”
These collaborations have also taken her to key cacao sites. Through the cacao work, she has had “opportunities to meet people in Trinidad and Tobago… to fly there and to see the cocoa growing. There is a gene bank there and all these varieties that have just been collected in the wild, so that then opens up new opportunities.”
Funding cycles and “too much science to do to stop”
As with much of her career, this cacao work is tied to limited funding.
“Our current funding will end early next year. I’ve got way too much science to do to stop. I really want to keep going. I’ve applied again for industry funding and is already starting this functional work anyway because it interests me, including tying to identify the sensor-helper kind of system in cacao.”
She describes cacao as a system where molecular work “is starting to build up now, but it’s still in its infancy.” It is “not really used” as a model, even though it is a high-value crop grown mostly by smallholder farmers in regions with limited research resources.
Curiosity, capability and non-traditional paths
Peri did not grow up imagining herself as a scientist, a feeling many of us may be able to relate to.
“I come from a family of non-scientists. They’re all kind of very, you know, academic, literate types, but not scientists. So it never seemed like a path I should have been… I never really was exposed to that.” She also did not start out certain she was “capable” of doing science. That sense emerged later. “Once I knew that I was capable… and probably a lot of people feel this way,”
For her, two qualities matter most.
“I think capability is something that you develop in a way. I think perseverance and curiosity are the things that you need in science. And you kind of can get by with your other limitations if you have those because you will find people who will assist you where you need it. I think sometimes people turn away. I think some people think they are not up to the task and they are interested. And I think those people need to be brought on and encouraged.”
Peri describes herself as someone who does not dwell on each decision for long.
“I think I’m probably one of those people that, you know, I don’t overthink things. I probably just leapt into life crazily and then you kind of make things work.”
Outside science, Peri also spent “a lot of time as a printmaker.” She says, “I do art and I really enjoy that,” but it “didn’t quite fulfil everything that I needed – I needed problems to really chew on.”
For her, science provides that.
“If you maintain a curiosity and a passion for answering questions in a methodical way… that’s what science gives us. It’s exciting, it’s so exciting, and I think maybe because I got the bug later it was a good thing.”
Today, she describes her situation as “very tenuous,” but remains open and generous. “My situation is very tenuous right now,” she says, “but, you know, I always like to meet other scientists and talk about their research.”
Be sure to reach out to Peri to learn more about her research, her research journey, or to collaborate!
THAT’S A WRAP
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