Lab members
Feng Tao 陶鳳
Principal Investigator
Nanyang Assistant Professor, Asian School of the Environment, Nanyang Technological University
Feng works at the interface of soil carbon science, mechanistic modelling and AI to understand the global soil carbon cycle and its response to climate change. Before joining NTU as a Nanyang Assistant Professor in 2026, Feng was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics and Intelligent Systems and the Institute of Energy and the Environment (co-hire) at the Pennsylvania State University (2025–2026), and an Eric & Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University (2023–2025), working with Ben Houlton on AI for scalable enhanced rock weathering. In 2019, Feng was a visiting fellow at the Global Soil Partnership Secretariat of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, mapping the global potential for soil organic carbon sequestration.
Feng received a Ph.D. with honors from the Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University (2023), advised by Yiqi Luo and Xiaomeng Huang, including a joint Ph.D. period at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena (2021–2022) with Markus Reichstein and Marion Schrumpf. Feng holds a B.Sc. with honors in Environmental Science and Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University (2018).
Current members
The lab is just getting started, and we are building the founding team now. If you want to work on soil carbon, carbon dioxide removal and AI, we would love to hear from you.
Students mentored before the lab
| Name | Role | Years | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Akshaya Shyamsundar Rekha | Undergraduate, Penn State (Honors Option) | 2026 | Carbon footprint of AI |
| Kevin Toepelt | Undergraduate, Cornell | 2025 | Transfer learning |
| Natalia Butler | PhD student, Cornell (rotation) | 2024 | Modeling enhanced rock weathering |
| Joshua Fan | PhD student, Cornell (co-mentored with Carla P. Gomes) | 2023–2026 | Biogeochemistry-Informed Neural Networks; ScIReN |
| Haodi Xu | PhD student, Cornell (co-mentored with Yiqi Luo) | 2023– | Biogeochemistry-Informed Neural Networks (BINN) |