As a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center; Jonathan Trent recently started a grass-roots movement called "Global Research into Energy and the Environment at NASA" (GREEN) in which he developed OMEGA. OMEGA is an ocean-going photobioreactor system to grow algae for making biofuels, food, fertilizer, and other useful products, while treating wastewater and sequestering carbon.
Jonathan earned his Ph.D. in marine biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and conducted postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Germany, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and University of Paris, France. He also worked at Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale Medical School and Argonne National Laboratory. Jonathan is an adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz and a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Jonathan's research has ranged from marine biology to molecular medicine, from astrobiology to nanotechnology.
Jonathan Trent does not represent NASA or the US Government in his TEDxYouth@SanDiego talk.