Patrick Mellor

Patrick currently leads Carbocene’s work in photosynthesis-enhanced tree research, new plant-biotechnology development, greenhouse and propagation systems, deployment planning, field and institutional development, and preparation for longer-term grants and partnerships.

His close involvement with plant care, propagation, greenhouse maintenance, experimental planning, biochar, and field activity keeps research decisions connected to the condition of the plants and the practical constraints of maintaining them.

That direct involvement connects scientific ambition to biological time: seasons, growth, stress, recovery, and the accumulated judgment required to keep an experiment alive. Research directions move forward according to their current technical status, funding, rights, and appropriate scientific relationships.

Patrick studied biological sciences, paleobiology, and botany at Oxford. He later studied and taught philosophy at San Francisco State University, with research interests involving consciousness, episodic memory, empathy, temporal representation, attention, and early modern rationalism.

He was selected as a Foresight Fellow in 2019. The early Carbocene framework emerged from the 2019 Foresight Planeteers workshop and was subsequently developed with Linda Maepa and Rob Ferber around biological productivity, carbon flux, decomposition, durable materials, and the integration of engineered plants into larger physical systems.

Living Carbon became one important setting in which parts of that broader program were developed. Patrick later established Carbocene in its present nonprofit form to pursue the program through integrated biological development, field research, measurement, and productive use.

Patrick co-founded Living Carbon and served as its chief technology officer, leading technical work within a collaborative program that carried engineered plants from laboratory development through propagation, field trials, and operational forest projects. Carbocene is the independent nonprofit institution he founded to carry plant biotechnology into a new scientific and field stage.

In that earlier role, Patrick helped conceptualize and develop a plant-biotechnology program spanning photosynthesis enhancement, biological durability, plant engineering, event selection, propagation, greenhouse systems, growth evaluation, and biomass analysis.

The program was collaborative and depended on scientists, horticultural staff, transformation partners, forestry researchers, and operational teams. Patrick’s technical role extended through nursery scaling, regulatory strategy, field trials, landowner and site relationships, forestry operations, commercial planting, field measurement, and work with carbon buyers and standards.

Carbocene builds on direct experience with both sides of the deployment boundary: creating engineered plants and carrying them into operational landscapes, then rebuilding biological capability when institutional support changed.