Associate Professor Tong Lei at the Institute of Emerging Agricultural Technology, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, has long been dedicated to research in digital agriculture, with a particular emphasis on plant system simulation driven by the integration of artificial intelligence and traditional plant models, as well as plant phenotyping based on optical sensing. His work has addressed the challenge of multi-attributes-based simulation of soil and vegetation optical properties.

He has published multiple papers in leading agriculture journals such as Remote Sensing of Environment, Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, and Food Chemistry. One of his studies was recognized as an Editor’s Choice Article by Geoderma, and another was selected as a Cover/Featured Article by Analytica Chimica Acta.

He also contributed to the development of the Helios 3D plant simulation software and led the creation of PhoTorch, a PyTorch-based tool for fitting gas exchange data under varying environmental responses of photosynthesis and stomatal conductance.

Differentiable plant system simulation

Multimodal plant phenotyping

Agricultural decision-making models

Education Background

2018-2022: University College Dublin, Ph.D. in Biosystems Engineering

2016-2018: University College Dublin, M.Eng.

2012-2016: Shenyang Agricultural University, B.AgrSc.

Professional Experience

Sep. 2025-Present: Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology,Institute of Emerging Agricultural Technology, Distinguished Associate Professor

Aug. 2022-Aug.2025: University of California,Davis, Postdoctoral Researcher

Jan. 2022-Feb.2022: ADIV, France,Erasmus+ Intern

Sep. 2019-Sep.2021: University College Dublin,Teaching Assistant

Jan. 2017-Sep.2017: Irish Water,Engineering Intern

1.Lei, T.*, & Bailey, B. N. (2025). A text-based, generative deep learning model for soil reflectance spectrum simulation in the solar range (400–2499 nm). Remote Sensing of Environment, 318, 114527.

2.Lei, T.*, Rizzo, K. T., & Bailey, B. N. (2025). PhoTorch: a robust and generalized biochemical photosynthesis model fitting package based on PyTorch. Photosynthesis Research, 163(2), 21.

3.Lei, T.*, Graefe, J., Mayanja, I. K., Earles, M., & Bailey, B. N. (2024). Simulation of automatically annotated visible and multi-/hyperspectral images using the Helios 3D plant and radiative transfer modeling framework. Plant Phenomics, 6, 0189.

4.Lei, T., & Sun, D. W.* (2022). Achieving joint calibration of soil Vis-NIR spectra across instruments, soil types and properties by an attention-based spectra encoding-spectra/property decoding architecture. Geoderma, 405, 115449.