Senior Plant Scientist
Gardin
Who are Gardin?
Gardin combines remote optical plant phenotyping with machine learning to optimise yield, nutrition, and quality of food production.
The changing climate and growth in the global population is putting significant stress on our current methods of food production, exacerbating existing issues of topsoil erosion, chemical treatment, and water scarcity.
Gardin enables the food industry to tackle these issues through data-driven precision farming and create positive outcomes for the climate by domesticating food production, quantifying supply chain carbon emissions, increasing resource efficiency and unlocking unproductive farmland to be repurposed as carbon sinks through nature-based climate solutions.
Who we are looking for
Gardin is seeking a talented senior plant scientist with extensive experience in plant science research programmes aimed at delivering value to commercial growers.
You'll be a crucial member of the science team, and will primarily focus on designing and running experimental campaigns in our brand new R&D plant growth facility. You will also be involved in programmes to test new functionalities of our sensors that will enable the product team to deliver amazing solutions to our growers.
Additionally, you will be providing your specialised knowledge in plant science, phenotyping and the AgriTech sector to the engineering and product teams to help them identify technical requirements and promising product ideas.
You will have the exciting chance to learn how to design and run a CEA growing facility by working closely with a growth facility manager with extensive experience in agronomy and management of indoor growing. Finally, the role will involve the opportunity to manage facility technicians and supervise students to ensure the collection of the highest quality data.
Gardin will be rapidly expanding during the next 18 months, and by joining us at this crucial stage you will help to build our science team from the ground up and make a direct contribution to the company growth and success.
What you will be achieving with us
- Design and run experimental campaigns to identify and assess novel metrics or data acquisition techniques to expand the capabilities of our products.
- Internally test novel products to ensure they work as expected in a growth environment and add value to growers.
- Collect, analyse, visualise and interpret data from R&D trials.
- Supervise technician's work to ensure experimental campaigns are run successfully by minimising delays, errors and producing the highest quality results.
- Assist with grant applications, project management and reporting.
- Work cross-functionally with hardware, software, data science and product teams to drive business goals and provide plant science domain knowledge.
- Develop best practices in the way plant/crop science research is carried out at Gardin and help build a strong R&D team from the ground up.
- Help our breakthrough innovation reach as many people as possible by actively engaging with your networks, presenting at conferences and being a champion for the company.
What we are looking for
- Proven track record of delivering great results in plant science/crops science research - Postdoc (preferred) or PhD experience equivalent.
- Strong background in plant physiology and stress responses. Specifically: water balance and stomatal responses, light responses and photomorphogenesis, abiotic stress responses.
- Worked on one or more of our crops of focus: herbs, leafy greens, strawberry, tomato.
- Direct experience with plant high-throughput phenotyping - especially chlorophyll fluorescence analysis, thermal imaging and multispectral imaging.
- Evidence of scripting skills in Python and/or R for exploratory data analysis.
- Evidence of strong written and spoken communication skills (scientific presentations, written papers, etc.).
- Good team player who is proactive at helping others and enjoys going far and beyond in an exciting, fast-paced, early-stage startup environment.
- For you to have a sense of humour!
Additional highly desirable skills
- Experience in early startups
- Experience with controlled environments - especially vertical farms and greenhouses.
- Evidence of strong network in AgTech and Academia
- Some experience with computer vision or machine learning approaches
Apply
[Start your application by dropping an email to Fabrizio at [email protected] with your CV and a cover letter.](mailto:[email protected]?subject=Senior%20Plant%20Scientist)
Gardin is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on any grounds. We empower, engage, enable and value differences between people, including; different races, ethnicities, genders, ages, religions, disabilities and sexual orientations, with differences in education, backgrounds, skill sets, experiences and knowledge.