Christine Edwards is a Professor in Applied Microbiology at RGU. She has over 30 years' experience in biotoxin research with more than 10 years' industrial experience, with the rest of her career in Universities (UCL, Dundee and RGU).

As co-director of CyanoSol at RGU, she has pioneered the study, production and curation of the world's largest portfolio of cyanotoxins made available to the global scientific community through industrial collaboration with Enzo Life Sciences. This expertise, along with bespoke provision for algal culturing (>1200 L), downstream processing, purification (mass guided prep chromatography) and characterisation of biotoxins (LC-MS) at RGU underpin the delivery of this project and has led to RCUK funding (EP/P029280/1), KTP, BBSRC and IBioIC funding.

Christine has extensive experience in method development for trace analysis of biotoxins in complex sample matrices (water, animal/fish tissues and cells) and) pioneered the benchmark method for microcystin analysis 

Professor Linda Lawton is an internationally renowned researcher with over 35 years experience in the study of toxic cyanobacteria. Linda joined RGU in 1994 as a Lecturer and in 2000 progressed to a Reader. In 2007 she gained Professor status and in 2021 was granted Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). Linda has outstanding success in international research collaboration and the award of major research grants totally over £10 Million have facilitated the establishment of a research group that is world leading in cyanotoxin detection and treatment.

Linda's principal outstanding contribution has been developing the seminal detection method for blue-green algal (cyanobacterial) toxins in drinking water which is now used worldwide. This includes having trained 100s of analysts on every continent to detect these potent chemicals which can result in cancer and organ damage. Reliable detection of the key class of toxin, the microcystins, enabled the WHO to introduce guideline values for acceptable levels in drinking water. Furthermore, the development of mass culturing and isolation procedures to ensure the global availability of analytical standards for a wide panel of cyanotoxins has grown into a significant commercial venture with a US-based biochemical company. A further significant achievement resulting from this work is the availability of robust techniques allowing for the replacement of animal testing in toxin detection.

Linda has been invited to give over 50 lectures worldwide for international professional bodies including American Water Works Association (AWWA), International Water Association (IWA), United States Environmental Protection Agency advising Congress (USEPA), Royal Society (water quality in Ghana delegation), United Nations Association. Linda's research has resulted in over 100 refereed publications in high quality international journals (within the top 75% i.e. Q1) and Linda has an h-index of 58. She has also published over 20 books chapters most of which were by invitation.