Dr Johannes Kromdijk

Growing up in an area of The Netherlands with an abundance of glasshouses, Johannes became interested in plants at an early age. He obtained his BSc and MSc in Plant Sciences at Wageningen University (NL). In 2007 he was awarded the Alexander James Keith PhD studentship to work with Prof. Howard Griffiths at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he studied the effects of light limitation on the efficiency of the carbon concentrating mechanism in C4 photosynthesis.

After finishing his PhD, he worked as a research scientist in greenhouse horticulture in Wageningen (NL) for three years, focusing on crop management strategies to optimize photosynthesis and energy use efficiency. In 2013, he joined the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency project team in the lab of Prof. Stephen Long at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (University of Illinois, USA). Here his work focused on the impact of photoprotection kinetics on the efficiency of photosynthesis during sun-shade transitions. This research led to a major breakthrough when faster recovery of photoprotection in transgenic tobacco was found to increase photosynthetic efficiency and productivity under field conditions. These results were published in Science (Kromdijk et al. 2016), and selected in the 12 key science moments of 2016 by the Guardian.