Speaking & writing
Speaking & Writing
I explain plant chemistry to audiences who did not come for plant chemistry: scientists in other fields, investors, students and the general public.
📽️ Selected talks
Invited seminars and workshops
Click any card for the detail.
🧭 Workshop facilitator
Seeds to Harvest: a commercialisation workshop
A 90-minute workshop I designed and facilitated at PSNA 2026, one of three run that year to get plant scientists thinking about how to translate their own ideas. It works through the questions that come first: is there a real problem, what is the solution, who is the market, and how would you find out.
🗓️ Conference activity
The complete record
I attended all of these. The filters show what I did at each one, including where a talk won Best Speaker.
- Jul 2026
ASPB Plant Biology Business Development Working Group
Ottawa, Canada · attended as an invited member of the ASPB Business Development Working Group
- Jul 2026
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Attended only
Seoul, South Korea
- Jul 2026
New Phytologist Editor-in-Chief Symposium Talk
Tartu, Estonia
- Jun 2026
Phytochemical Society of North America Workshop facilitator
Madison, Wisconsin · commercialisation workshop
- Apr 2026
Hablemos de Ciencia PosterIn Spanish
Madison, Wisconsin · presented in Spanish
- Mar 2026
Biobased Symposium TalkBest Speaker Award
Madison, Wisconsin
- Dec 2025
NeurIPS Attended only
San Diego, California
- Aug 2025
ASPB Plant Biology Conference Correspondent
Milwaukee, Wisconsin · the 2025 correspondents ↗
- Jun 2025
Phytochemical Society of North America Poster
Toronto, Canada
- Aug 2024
Botany University Challenge (BUC2024) Runners-up
Oxford, UK · quiz team member, second place, and a great deal of botanical trivia
- 2024
High Value Biorenewables Network Annual Meeting Attended only
York, UK
- Nov 2023
High Value Biorenewables Network Annual Meeting Attended only
Manchester, UK
- Aug 2023
ASPB Plant Biology Conference Correspondent
Savannah, Georgia · announcement ↗
- Jul 2023
Phytochemical Society of North America TalkBest Speaker Award
East Lansing, Michigan
- Apr 2023
Natural Products Talk
University of Warwick, UK
- Mar 2023
RSC Chemical Biology and Bio-organic Group Symposium Poster
Oxford, UK
- Feb 2023
Chem@York TalkBest Speaker Award
University of York, UK
- Nov 2022
High Value Biorenewables Network Annual Meeting Attended only
Harrogate, UK
- Jun 2022
Directing Biosynthesis VI Poster
Edinburgh, UK
- May 2022
Three Minute Thesis final, University of York TalkFinalist
York, UK
- Nov 2021
North East Postgraduate Conference Poster
Online
- Sep 2021
University of York Interdisciplinary Conference Talk
York, UK
- Mar 2021
High Value Biorenewables Network Annual Meeting Attended only
Harrogate, UK
- Jun 2020
Directing Biosynthesis V Attended only
Online
Nothing in that category.
Invited seminars are in the cards above. The full record is also in the CV.
📗 Editorial and writing
Editorial work
Continuing position
Research Highlights Editor, The Plant Journal
I select significant papers published in The Plant Journal and write the Research Highlights that introduce them to a broad readership. In practice it means reading closely outside my own field every month, interviewing the authors, and finding the argument that makes a specialist result matter to everyone else.
2026 Plantae Fellow
Themed weekly content, monthly webinars and a great deal of collaborative writing with fellows on three continents.
The 2026 cohort ↗ASPB Conference Correspondent
Official correspondent at two annual meetings: interviews, session write-ups and chasing scientists down corridors.
2025 correspondents ↗Selected pieces
Four things wrong with how we teach plant science
Static pathway diagrams instead of living processes, animal-default examples for universal biology, over-generalising from one model organism, and still lecturing at people. Written on my own.
Read itWhat vanilla, morphine and denim have in common
Think about the last thing you ate. Then think about where the flavour came from. Written with the other Plantae Fellows.
Read itHow to build a start-up in plant sciences
Problem–solution fit, product–market fit, IP, funding, and the realities of building a company around biological innovation. With Fengoula Avgeri.
Read itThe unwritten CV of a plant scientist
Resilience, systems thinking, and explaining your work to someone who thought you just really liked gardening. With Anastasia Kolesnikova.
Read itBeyond AlphaFold: the technologies waiting to change plant science
Digital twins, plant biosensors, foundation models and lab AI. With Ruth Nichols and Sonia Balyan.
Read itCelebrating those who stand up for science against the odds
An interview with Eucharia Nwaichi, winner of the 2022 John Maddox Prize.
Read itThe evolutionary origin of acutumine biosynthesis
An interview with Jing-Ke Weng on enzyme discovery and predicting metabolic pathways, written as ASPB Conference Correspondent.
Read itThe last piece of the nicotine puzzle
Chang et al. on the final steps of nicotine biosynthesis, a hidden glycosylation step and a vacuole-targeting metabolon.
Read itQuinine, deconstructed
Lombe et al. resolving the core biosynthetic logic of cinchona alkaloids, and a route to engineered analogues.
Read itNothing in that category yet.
The complete, live publication record is on the research page.
📺 Elsewhere
Media coverage
First Principles Podcast
The podcast covered the New Phytologist paper. My write-up of what that felt like.
Read the write-upPanSci video explainer
From academic paper to viral video: PanSci turned the work into a video for a Mandarin-speaking audience.
Read the write-upWARF Award 2025
The award video for the natural pigment work.
Watch it🧰 For organisers
Speaker kit
Short bio · 50 words
Dr Charlay Wood is a plant biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She studies how plants build new chemistry and how those pathways can be redesigned, turning them towards pigments, pharmaceuticals and flavours. She is Research Highlights Editor at The Plant Journal, and works on the commercialisation of plant science.
Medium bio · 100 words
Dr Charlay Wood is a plant biochemist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, working between metabolic engineering and synthetic biology to redirect plant metabolism towards high-value compounds. Her PhD at the University of York identified OLADO, a bacterial-like decarboxy-oxidase that runs the first committed step of a plant alkaloid pathway, published in New Phytologist in 2026. Her entrepreneurial background runs from her own business in 2016 through direct sales and start-up operations to Natural Red Pigments, an exploration of whether engineered soybean could supply a natural red colourant, where she led the customer discovery as NSF I-Corps Entrepreneurial Lead. She holds a continuing part-time editorial position as Research Highlights Editor at The Plant Journal, is a 2026 Plantae Fellow, and has won three Best Speaker Awards.
What I speak about
Plant metabolic engineering and synthetic biology; enzyme discovery and parallel evolution; taking a plant-derived compound from discovery to product; and the commercialisation of academic science, as a talk or as a workshop. Length and level adjust to the room.
CV and contact
Full curriculum vitae, and the fastest route to a reply.
Parallel evolution of plant alkaloid biosynthesis from bacterial-like decarboxylases
Invited seminar at the University of Minnesota Duluth on the OLADO work and what it means for finding unknown alkaloid pathways.
The biosynthesis of the Securinega alkaloids
Speaking on behalf of the Maeda lab as part of the Plant Chemical & Molecular Biology Seminar Series at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
How to get conference funding
Invited talk for the University of York Postdoc Society. In 2023 I received £5,323 in grants and awards to attend conferences. This covered exactly how, with practical advice for early-career researchers funding their own travel.
First steps of Δ1-piperideine-derived alkaloid biosynthesis in Flueggea suffruticosa
Invited presentation for the PhytoChem Talks series, a virtual seminar series for the phytochemistry community.
A biology workshop for high school students
A two-hour workshop I designed and delivered for a selected group of high school students at the University of York, aimed at getting them to study biology at degree level.
Built as slides, games and discussion points rather than a lecture, so that the students did most of the talking.
Three Minute Thesis: “Alkaloids: For Killing, Curing and Cooking”
The Three Minute Thesis challenge asks PhD researchers to explain their work to a non-specialist audience in three minutes, with a single static slide. I was a finalist in the University of York's 2022 competition, presenting on how understanding plant alkaloid biosynthesis could make valuable drugs like morphine cheaper and less wasteful to produce.
A brilliant exercise in distilling years of research into something anyone can connect with.