Thomas Crowther is a leading global ecologist whose research focuses on the connections between biodiversity and climate change. He conducted his undergraduate and doctoral studies at Cardiff University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale Climate and Energy Institute and a Marie Curie fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology at Wageningen University.

He was Professor of Ecology in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich from 2017, where he founded Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary group exploring how ecological systems regulate the climate. His landmark 2019 study estimated the global potential for tree restoration, inspiring the World Economic Forum’s Trillion Trees initiative.

In 2020, he founded Restor, an open-data platform supporting community-led restoration projects worldwide, and later founded SEED, a biodiversity monitoring tool. He served as founding co-chair of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2021. He is president of the BRANCH institute, an international network studying biodiversity and human wellbeing. He is currently based at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.