Carly Conlan was a research officer at The Australian National University. She worked with RIPE to realize the photosynthetic potential of plants by bioengineering Rubisco in tobacco plants to identify superior traits. Conlan has degrees in biochemistry, archaeology, and comparative genomics and cytogenetics. Her work has been published in several journals, including PLOS One, Chromosome Research, Genome Research, and Science and Nature. Conlan left RIPE to become a high school science teacher.