Liz Baggs is Professor of Food and Environmental Security. She joined the University of Edinburgh in 2017 as Deputy Director of the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security. She is a soil biogeochemist, and develops and applies stable isotope approaches to investigate plant-soil-microbe interactions and to distinguish between different microbial processes in the rhizosphere, particularly in relation to greenhouse gas production and soil fertility. She has been in continuous receipt of funding from UKRI since 2000 for her research in temperate and tropical systems, including current GCRF projects in Malawi, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, DR Congo and Kenya. Liz has supervised over 40 PhD students, and is the Programme coordinator for the PhD Agriculture and Food Security at the University of Edinburgh.

Liz has held a variety of strategic leadership roles, including several panel and board memberships with the BBSRC and NERC. She is currently a member of the NERC Advisory Network, Deputy Chair of BBSRC Committee B, a core member of UKRI Future Leaders College, and a REF UoA6 panel member. She has also recently been President of the British Society of Soil Science, and was Head of School of Biological Sciences at the University of Aberdeen for five years prior to joining the University of Edinburgh.