[4][7][8] His PhD thesis investigated the effects of elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) on powdery mildew in barley and was supervised by John Farrar and Bob Whitbread.
[9] Following his PhD, Hibberd completed three years of postdoctoral research at the University of Sheffield with Paul Quick,[10] Malcolm Press[3] and Julie Scholes,[11] investigating interactions between parasitic plants and their hosts.
The Hibberd laboratory investigates the efficiency of the C4 photosynthetic pathway, with the aim of understanding its repeated evolution and also contributing to improving crop productivity.
This would greatly increase the efficiency of photosynthesis and create a rice cultivar which could "have 50% more yield" which "would impact billions of people".
In 2000 Hibberd was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship to investigate the role of photosynthesis in veins of C3 plants.