Maggie Gill was CEO and Director of Research at the Macaulay Institute (one of the institutes whose merger created the James Hutton Institute) from 2000 to 2006. She has had a 40-year career in the agri-food sector, split almost evenly between conducting research, managing research programme funding, and advising research funders (in the UK, New Zealand, European Commission and, for international development, the World Bank and numerous national international development departments). Her original interests were in livestock nutrition (mainly grass-fed sheep and cattle) but over time those broadened to interests in interactions between agriculture more generally, with the environment and again to food systems and in the last two decades to the interface between science and policy.
She left the Macaulay to be the first Chief Scientific Adviser on Rural Affairs and the Environment in the Scottish Government and currently chairs both the Scottish Science Advisory Council and BBSRC's Sustainable Agriculture and Food Strategy Panel. She also chairs the Science and Stakeholder Advisory Panel of Our Land and Water National Science Challenge programme in New Zealand and until 2020 chaired the Think Tank of the European Commission project Fit4Food 2030. She is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Aberdeen, currently living in rural Aberdeenshire.
