Dr. Jason B. Thomas is the Founder and CEO of The Pennycress Company, where he is bioengineering high-yielding pennycress seeds to produce biofuels that help farmers and biorefineries increase profits while improving ecosystem health. A plant scientist by training, Dr. Thomas earned his Ph.D. in Plant Biological Sciences from the University of Minnesota, where he used CRISPR to engineer pennycress plants with improved traits and received a Fulbright Fellowship to bring his research to France. He previously conducted postdoctoral research at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University studying drought biology and bioinformatics approaches in plants. Today, his work focuses on combining biotechnology, agriculture, and supply chain partnerships to build scalable solutions for the emerging bioeconomy.