Phenotyper - One who measures biological systems because you can't understand what you don't measure.
Understanding systems of plants, microbes, and soils requires diverse and tedious measurements and frameworks for connecting all the information. My work leverages diverse measurement modalities from gas flux to imaging to make sense of the complicated whole.
My work has increasingly converged around AI, real-time sensing, connectivity, experimental design, and automation to enable agentic and autonomous discovery across scientific domains. One idea that has guided this direction is the experiment you can talk to: systems that let researchers interact naturally with instruments, streaming data, analysis, and experimental workflows. I see this as a practical step toward deeper autonomy, where AI augments experimentalists by helping interpret data, explore hypotheses, and identify meaningful next actions.
My approach is grounded in the full experimental stack—from rigorous experimental design and measurement hardware to software, robotics, analysis, validation, physical safety, and cybersecurity. I am now extending this foundation beyond biology toward agentic systems for scientific coding, instrumentation, robotics, and adaptive experimentation. The goal is to move beyond hype and build open, interoperable, experimentally validated tools that are genuinely useful to scientific communities.
Springing from my fascination with plant roots beginning with root behavior and game theory, I have studied whole-plant ecophysiology with a focus on roots for 20 years. Quickly, I adopted a microeconomic view of plant form and function focused on carbon allocations and expenditures in my first paper to helping develop the root economics space. To measure the hidden dimensions of form and function, I develop root and shoot phenotyping platforms ranging from flux-based to image-based, over time leading to automated workflows and AI approaches. I have leveraged 15N-stable isotope studies for demonstrating root activity, and am currently using new 13C flux instruments. My current biological interests focus on carbon balance and resource exchange across the plant-microbe-soil system, how organisms respond to environmental stress, and how tradeoffs among growth, resource acquisition, and resilience can be understood and ultimately optimized.
My organizational missions have at times focused me on fundamental research on plant form and function, as well as more applied trait discovery for direct breeding pipelines. I proposed functional phenomics as a research strategy for understanding plant physiology using high-throughput phenotyping of large diversity panels, bioinformatics, and simulations. To bring root traits into breeding pipelines and genetic studies, I developed RhizoVision Explorer as the number one root image analysis software with more than 14,000 downloads, imaging platforms for field root crowns, greenhouse gantry shoot imaging, a high-throughput root nutrient uptake platform, and root respiration. I have leveraged image-based methods for more than a decade and increasingly focus on multimodal registration and interpretation, hyperspectral signatures, spatially resolved biological measurements, and AI approaches including vision transformers. This work is leading to the spatial biology of the rhizosphere continuum.
