Belinda Medlyn is Distinguished Professor of Ecosystem Modelling at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University. She is one of the world’s leading ecosystem modellers, with over 25 years of experience in modelling responses of vegetation to environmental change. Her research work focuses on translating information from plant and ecosystem scale experiments to develop models predicting vegetation function. She has been at the forefront of the development of models to capture vegetation responses to elevated carbon dioxide, rising temperature and drought. Her research on stomatal conductance has drawn together the main strands of evidence about stomatal behaviour to develop a unified theory that now serves as a major framework for understanding stomata at ecosystem scale. She has been instrumental in international model intercomparison projects evaluating ecosystem models against Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) experiments, and leads model synthesis activities at the Eucalyptus FACE experiment in Western Sydney. She was a Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher since 2018, won the Australian Research Council Georgina Sweet Laureate Fellowship in 2019, and was elected to the Australian Academy of Science in 2023. She currently heads a team of researchers developing the new Dynamics of Australian Vegetation (DAVE) model.