Tim Brodribb is an evolutionary biologist. His work integrates and upscales plant functional and evolutionary processes from cells to whole plants to ecosystems, allowing him to answer fundamental questions in biology. His work explains why leaves die during drought, why some plant species are more vulnerable to water stress than others, and how flowering plants evolved the capacity for rapid photosynthesis and growth. Many of these discoveries have been accomplished through technical innovation, yielding new tools that are currently used worldwide to assess plant vulnerability to drought.