Tom Clemente

Principal Investigator and Professor Tom Clemente leads a lab at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He is also the Director of the Plant Transformation Core Research Facility at the University of Nebraska. Clemente received a B.S. in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.S. in Plant Pathology from Oklahoma State University. He obtained aPh.D. in Biotechnology from North Carolina State University. He has earned multiple awards, including Nebraska’s Wheat Growers Association Person of the Year. Clemente and his lab have published numerous papers, appearing in journals such as Planta and Crop Science.

Clemente is the national leader in Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of sweet sorghum. He will also apply this technology to the close sorghum relative, Miscanthus. As part of the PETROSS program, he is engineering photosynthetic improvements and an optimized hydrocarbon synthesis pathway into sorghum.