ASPS Life Member Associate Professor Hendrik (Hank) Greenway

ASPS Life Member

Associate Professor Hendrik (Hank) Greenway

University of Western Australia, WA

Hank Greenway arrived in Australia in the 1950’s as Hendrik Groenewegen, a graduate of the Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands. He first worked as a soil scientist in South Australia and, after 1952, in the Riverina. He then completed a PhD at the University of Adelaide in the venerable team led by Professor Bob Robertson, doyen of membrane transport in plants, studying salt tolerance in barley. Hank returned to the CSIRO Division of Irrigation Research at Griffith, New South Wales, where he worked on ion transport in plants.

After moving to the University of Western Australia in 1967, he established a group of international stature investigating plant responses to the environment – salinity and waterlogging in particular. His research has relied heavily on rice and algae as models to quantify acclimation to stress: the principles laid out in some 135 research papers and many major reviews provide a framework for modern thinking about acclimation to abiotic stress.

Hank has embraced many disciplines in plant physiology, including nutritional biology, enzymology, bioenergetics, membrane physiology and gene expression. Every new experiment is guided by curiosity. When asked to summarise his research approach, Hank paraphrases von Clausewitz, saying “No research plan survives contact with the subsequent experimental results”.

Hank is a truly international scientist, forging collaborations with colleagues from Asia, Europe and the US, vigorously co-publishing with them and insisting that his graduate students spend time in laboratories abroad. Hank’s connections with SE Asia and its staple crop, rice, can be traced to his time in Indonesia in the 1940’s: this led to extensive training and exchange programmes with the countries of the region. He was the prime instigator of the RN Robertson Fellowship, keeping alive the principles of intellectual curiosity that Bob Robertson espoused. Hank was an inaugural member of our Society and was honoured with a Doctor of Science by the University of WA in 1986 and the Chancellor’s Medal in 2003. He remains active as a plant biologist well into retirement and enjoys the affections of his family and many colleagues.