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            TONY PRIDMORE

PROFESSOR OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & DIRECTOR, PhenomUK 


Tony Pridmore is Professor and Head of School at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham. Building on 15 years work on computer vision methods for plant phenotyping - the automatic, objective measurement of structural and functional properties of plants - he has served as  Director of PhenomUK, the UK plant and crop phenotyping network, since its creation in 2018. In February 2023 PhenomUK began its transition from a UKRI Technology Touching Life network into a national research infrastructure, taking on the work of the £2.4M UKRI-funded UK Plant and Crop Phenotyping Infrastructure Scoping Activity.      .

research interests



My technical research interests centre on image analysis and computer vision. My work has always had a strong applied component, and over the last 15 years I have addressed problems in visual tracking, the recovery of 3D shape from multiple views and bioimage analysis raised by plant systems biology and image-based plant phenomics.  My and my colleagues' work on controlled environment root phenotyping in particular has lead to the development and release of a number of software tools (e.g. RootTrace, RooTrak, Cellset, Rootnav) which have been widely adopted. My work on segmentation of X-ray computed tomography images of plant roots growing in soil was central to the development of the University of Nottingham’s £4M Hounsfield Facility

and infrastructures 



PhenomUK began life in 2018 as a Technology Touching Life Network charged with improving phenotyping tools (through a series of 11 pilot technology development projects) and laying the groundwork for both a national phenotyping research infrastructure and the UK's involvement in the ESFRI project EMPHASIS

Building upon the previous EPPN and EPPN2020 projects,  EMPHASIS was accepted onto the ESFRI Roadmap in 2016 and aims to create a distributed, pan-European research infrastructure making phenotyping facilities, data and expertise available to plant, crop and agricultural scientists and industries across its currently 11 partner countries. Following involvement in both EPPN and EPPN2020 I now serve as UK Scientific Representative on the EMPHASIS Interim General Assembly.

The recently awarded UK Infrastructure Fund Scoping Activity focusses on the provision of a UK phenotyping infrastructure but also aims to develop the PhenomUK research infrastructure into a national node of EMPHASIS. The practical goal of the project is to produce a business plan and proposal to be submitted to the UKRI Infrastructure fund in 2025.      

contact me



Email : tony.pridmore@nottingham.ac.uk

Office :  C32, School of Computer Science

Address : Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Rd, Nottingham NG8 1BB

Phone : (+44)115 8466510