Ji Zhou
Head of Data Sciences Department
NIAB
Ji Zhou (周济) is Head of the Data Sciences Department at NIAB. He is an expert in multi-scale plant phenotyping, computer vision (CV) based trait analysis, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI) modelling. Since his appointment at NIAB in early 2020, he and his collaborators have been jointly contributing to the plant research community worldwide, including AI and CV powered analytic solutions for assessing seed quality and vigour (e.g. SeedGerm), screening nitrogen use efficiency wheat varieties using LiDAR (CropQuant-3D), performing drone phenotyping to quantify growth-related trait for crop improvement (AirMeasurer), establishing ultra-scale yield prediction for lettuces (AirSurf), and monitoring wheat growth and yield formation (e.g. CropSight and YieldQuant-Mobile). These studies were enabled by cross-disciplinary research with labs in the UK (e.g. the University of Cambridge), France (e.g. INRAe and the University of Angers), Japan (the Tokyo University), and China (the Chinese Academy of Sciences).
Ji is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB), a core member of PhenomUK, an associate editor for journals such as Horticulture Research and Plant Phenomics. Since 2013, he has published 30+ research articles (both English and Chinese) in leading academic journals. Moreover, Ji works closely with breeding and growing companies such as Bayer Crop Science, Limagrain, Syngenta and the POME consortium. He holds a Professorship (chair) at the Nanjing Agricultural University, course lecturer and project supervisor for MPhil in Crop Sciences, computer science undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Prior to NIAB, Ji was a project leader at Earlham, a joint research fellow between JIC and TGAC, and a post-doctoral researcher at The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) in Norwich. Before his academic career, he worked in industry for nearly a decade, initially as a bilingual IT professional in Shanghai, then a systems analyst and a project consultant at Aviva UK.