Professor Hirt studied biochemistry at the Univ. of Cape Town and Vienna where he received his PhD in 1987. After post-doctoral fellowships at the Univ. of Oxford and Wageningen, he became Professor of Genetics at the Univ. of Vienna. In 2007, he was nominated Director of the INRAe Plant Genomics Institute in Paris and of the Center for Desert Agriculture at KAUST in 2014. Hirt has a long standing record on how plants can survive under abiotic or biotic stress conditions (several hundred publications, h-index 96). His current research is focused on how plants can survive under abiotic or biotic stress conditions by identifying and using beneficial microbes of desert plants. His work aims to provide sustainable solutions to restore vegetation and agriculture in arid regions by improving drought, heat and/or salt tolerance of a variety of crops.