Understanding and engineering the chemical principles of life
We combine our training in Chemical Engineering with ideas from Systems and Synthetic Biology to understand the metabolism of plants, as a first step in developing novel crop varieties that use resources more efficiently and are better adapted to an ever-changing environment.
We develop biomolecular and computational tools and use them to study plant growth. We are particularly interested in learning how cells acquire specialized functions, and how these specialized cells exchange metabolites and information for the benefit of the whole organism.