Sarah McKim completed her PhD in floral developmental genetics with Prof George Haughn at the University of British Columbia. Following a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, Sarah started her own group at the University of Dundee where she uses barley as a model system to investigate how cereals grow and develop. Underpinned by exploitation and generation of enabling technologies, Sarah’s research team has discovered genes and mechanisms controlling important architectural and agronomic traits, such as stem elongation, inflorescence branching and grain size and shape. One of her current projects examines how cereals coordinate multiple epidermal features important for resiliency and yield. In a major advance, Sarah’s team and collaborators identified a signalling pathway which jointly regulates epidermal cell patterning, including stomatal complex formation and spacing, and cuticle specialisations. Her research now aims to reveal possible mechanistic relationships explaining epidermal coordination and to evaluate how combinations of epidermal features impact crop performance.