Tom Avenson

Background

About Tom Avenson

I am an inductive scientist with wide ranging academic and industrial experience. Using science to unravel the mysteries of climate change in the context of sustainable food production across the globe requires conceiving and addressing seemingly intractable questions that span many scientific disciplines. Throughout my career, in addition to advancing novel insights about how solar energy powers our biosphere through the process of photosynthesis, I have specifically been involved in leveraging measurements of photosynthesis to: 1) understand the physiologic and molecular bases of light capture regulation, a 'hot' topic because of the potential of light capture to be 'engineered' so as to improve crop yield; 2) understand the 'mode of action' of the first ever commercial drought gene; 3) develop world renowned instrumentation used by international scientists to measure wide ranging aspects of photosynthesis; and 4) demonstrate key features of photosynthesis that integrate environment (airflow and CO2 levels) and growth of plants in controlled environment agriculture (CEA). I am particularly interested in using non-invasive techniques to understand hidden mysteries of energy transduction in plants. Such techniques are based on visible, near infrared (NIR) and infrared (IR) spectroscopies and a clever method termed pulsed amplitude modulation (PAM) chlorophyll a fluorescence.