I am group leader of the indoor farming research group at Biopterre, in the province of Québec, Canada. My group works on smart cultivation techniques (use of AI in decision making, indoor cultivation, use of LEDs) and on the production of secodnary metabolites in plants (cannabis and plants for the pharmaceutical industry).

I have been until recently affiliated with the plant ecophysiology group at the Institute of Botany of the University of Natural Ressources and Life Sciences (BOKU Wien), in Vienna, Austria, where I was the principal investigator of a WWTF funded project on the dynamic anatomy of plant leaves. I was until recently funded through a Lise-Meitner Fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). From 2014 to 2017, I was a Katherine Esau postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis, in the lab of Matthew Gilbert.

I’m currently working on understanding the physiological and structural basis of resource-use efficiency in plants, especially water and light use at the whole leaf level. My expertise is vast and my work is focused on basic and applied research in plant physiology, from growth cabinets to broad field experiments. My research has a strong technological component, using diverse techniques and building custom equipments to get quantitative measurements on plants and soil, in order to integrate into leaf, plant, or field level models.

My main collaborators of the past years have been Danny Tholen (BOKU) and Adam Roddy (Florida International University).

In the WWTF project I am leading, and I closely collaborating with:
Ingeborg Lang (plant cell biologist, University of Vienna)
Walter Kropatsch and Jiří Hladůvka (pattern recongnition and image analysis, TU Wien)
Anja Geitmann (plant cell biologist, McGill University)
Anne Bonnin (radiation physicist, Swiss Light Source)