Associate Professor Tong Lei at the Institute of Emerging Agricultural Technology, Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology,has long been dedicated to research indigitalagriculture, with a particular emphasis onplantsystem simulation driven by the integration of artificial intelligence and traditional plantmodels, as well as plant phenotyping based on optical sensing. His work has addressed the challenge of multi-attributes-basedsimulation of soil and vegetationoptical properties.
He has published multiple papers in leadingagriculturejournalssuch asRemote Sensing of Environment,Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, andFood Chemistry. One of his studies was recognized as an Editor’s Choice Article byGeoderma, and another was selected as a Cover/Featured Article byAnalytica Chimica Acta.
He also contributed to the development of the Helios 3Dplantsimulation 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.
Research Areas
Differentiable plantsystemsimulation
Multimodalplantphenotyping
Agriculturaldecision-makingmodels
Education and Professional Experience
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
Representative Publications
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.
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.
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.
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.
People
