Following his PhD, Hibberd completed three years of
postdoctoral research at the
University of Sheffield,
Yorkshire, with Paul Quick,
Malcolm Press investigating interactions between
parasitic plants and their hosts. He moved to Cambridge to work with John C. Gray in 1997, and started his own group in 2000. The Hibberd laboratory investigates the efficiency of the
C4 photosynthetic pathway, with the aim of understanding its repeated evolution and also contributing to improving
crop productivity. Hibberd's research has been funded by the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the
FP7 program of the
European Union,
Awards and honours In 2000 Hibberd was awarded a
BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship to investigate the role of photosynthesis in veins of C3 plants. In 2005 he was awarded a President's medal by the
Society for Experimental Biology, and in 2007 The
Melvin Calvin Award by the International Society of Photosynthesis Research. In 2008 Hibberd was named by the journal
Nature as one of
"Five crop researchers who could change the world" for his research that is attempting to replace
C3 carbon fixation in
rice with
C4 carbon fixation. ==References==