Michael Renton completed his Honours program at UWA in Maths, looking at control in chaotic systems, and his PhD at the University of Queensland in the Centre for Plant Architecture Informatics, developing new approaches to modelling the interactions between plant form, function and environment with functional-structural plant models (FSPMs). His post-doc in Montpellier, France, married stochastic models with structural models to create virtual apple trees. He then returned to Perth to teach applied maths at UWA, before spending a couple of years creating the Weed Seed Wizard (a model of seedbank dynamics) at the Department of Agriculture and Food. He started as an Assistant Professor in Computational Agro-Ecology in the School of Plant Biology at UWA in July 2007, and held a joint appointment with CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences until 2012. He is now an Associate Professor and his current projects involve the modelling of weeds and seedbank population dynamics, evolution of resistance to herbicides and pesticides, competition and interactions between plants and their environments in natural and managed systems, bio-economic modelling and optimal land use in agricultural systems and mixed-use landscapes, and dispersal of biological organisms.