The big picture: using wildflower strips for pest control
Sustainable Soils and Crops
Mikhail is a principal research scientist at Rothamsted Research, specialising in mathematical modelling and computer simulation of agricultural and biological systems. Throughout his career, he has been involved in assessments of climate change impacts on agricultural systems, including impacts on crops, pests and disease. In recognition of this work, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research in 2008. He is a principal developer of the LARS-WG stochastic weather generator, a computationally inexpensive tool for generation local-scale climate scenarios based on climate projections from global climate models. LARS-WG has been used in more than 75 countries by academics for research and in several universities as an educational tool. Mikhail is a principal developer of the Sirius crop simulation model. He pioneered the use of crop models for designing crop ideotypes for target environments. Sirius is used as a research tool by many scientists to understand crop responses to environmental variations, and by farmers to optimise water and N management. Mikhail is actively involved in international activities on crop model inter-comparison and improvement, such as AgMIP and MACSUR. In 2018, Mikhail was elected as Fellow Member of the European Academy of Sciences for outstanding contribution to science. In 2023, in Reuters list of the world’s top climate scientists, he was ranked #109. He published over 150 refereed papers; his work was cited over 22,500 and his Google h-index is 70.