Tom Clemente

Tom Clemente is a professor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He is a national leader in Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of sorghum. As part of WEST, he will oversee transgenic sorghum generation; coordinate the movement of regulated seed and plant material; and contribute to hybridization of transgenic plants with wild-type accessions.

Tom is the director of the Plant Transformation Core Research Facility at UNL. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in plant pathology from Oklahoma State University. He earned his doctorate in biotechnology from North Carolina State University. He has also earned multiple awards, including Nebraska’s Wheat Growers Association Person of the Year. Tom and his lab have published numerous papers, appearing in journals such as Planta and Crop Science. Tom is also a member of another ARPA-E-funded project: Plants Engineered to Replace Oil in Sugarcane and Sweet Sorghum (PETROSS).