Prof. Dr Thomas Crowther, born in 1986, is an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich, Switzerland. He founded Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scientists studying global ecosystems to facilitate local efforts that protect, restore and manage biodiversity worldwide.
Crowther serves as co-chair of the advisory board of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and he is the founder of Restor, a digital platform to facilitate global conservation and restoration. He is particularly interested in the ecological feedbacks that determine the distribution of biodiversity on Earth and the impacts of that biodiversity on the global carbon cycle.
His holistic approach to studying ecosystems includes the networks of plants and soil organisms that interactively govern carbon exchanges between the land and atmosphere.
=After completing his PhD at Cardiff University, Crowther received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Yale Climate and Energy Institute. In 2015 he was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO) at Wageningen University to research the impact of carbon cycle feedback on climate change.