I have expertise in plant architectural development and their response to environmental conditions and neighbouring plants. I have developed several models for grapevines that are used by the New Zealand wine industry. My main interest is understanding and modelling the effects of the environment and the source / sink relationships of the plant on the joint accumulation of water and dry matter in fruit in connection with the metabolism of sugars and acids, with a long-term goal of developing digital twins of orchards. I did my undergraduate studies on Agro-meteorology at China Agricultural University (CAU), before continuing MSc study on radiation interception and plant water use in intercropping. Later, I enrolled to the PhD programme of Wageningen University in September 2010, modelling the plasticity of architectural development of wheat and maize. I then switched to grapevine and fruit modelling and worked as a Postdoc at INRA Bordeaux before starting at Plant & Food Research, continuing work on grapevine and fruit modelling.

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  Research history and publications