Dr. Thomas David Alcock

Academic Career and Research Areas

Dr. Thomas Alcock completed his PhD at the University of Nottingham in 2018, where he also performed his first postdoctoral project. Whilst there, he worked on the mineral nutrition of crucifers, Brazil nuts and cowpea, and led a sustainability assessment of oil crop production. In 2020, he joined the TUM as a postdoc within the Professorship of Crop Physiology, where he worked intensively on rapeseed nutrition. In September 2025, he started his own research group, funded by the DFG’s Emmy Noether Programme.

Dr. Alcock is committed to uncovering mechanisms by which plants can increase the uptake of micronutrients from the soil and transfer them to edible tissues. In doing so, we can boost the nutritional quality of crop outputs, even under suboptimal climatic conditions. Dr. Alcock’s research is particularly focussed on how variation in the uptake selectivity of root cells affects iron, zinc and selenium accumulation in maize exposed to water limitation, using a combination of elemental quantification and spatial-distribution analysis, confocal microscopy, and transcriptomics.

Awards

• Emmy Noether Fellowship of the DFG (2025)
• Funding from the Leonhard Lorenz Stiftung (2023)
• Funding from the University of Nottingham's Future Food Partnership Fund (2019)
• University of Nottingham Future Food Beacon Doctoral Prize (2018)