Richard ‘Dick’ Byrne is a Senior Lecturer at Harper Adams University, Shropshire where he has taught land management and rural development policy since 2000.

A Chartered Geographer of the Royal Geographical Society, in 2007 he was awarded one of the prominent Nuffield Farming Scholarships to study the potential threat from agroterrorism to the UK and formulate policy responses to it. His current research focuses on rural development, particularly in post-conflict environments. He is currently working in Nigeria with a number of rural development projects developing agripreneurship with youth vulnerable to human trafficking.

Prior to joining Harper Adams, he was a lecturer in Development Geography at the University of Southampton, where he previously undertook his PhD in rural geography. Preceding this he had taken a BSc in environmental science and an MSc in Rural Resource Management. He is married with four children and splits his time between Shropshire and the New Forest.