Richard Nair is plant-soil ecologist and biogeochemist. He is interested in how plants respond and feed back to their environment, both above- and below- ground and when they are living and when they are dead. He works at Trinity College Dublin and has previously worked at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany and the University of Edinburgh, UK. His main research topics are phenology, roots, and linkages between plant function and biogeochemistry. He is particularly concerned with the scalability of observational results and how process knowledge can be linked to large scale problems. He has used physical advances (e.g. novel isotope methods), new technologies (e.g. automated robotic sampling, machine learning for image analysis) and intellectual innovations aiming toward fundamental theory useful the models which underpin our potential to adapt to climate change.