He is a former senior research scientist at Arnold Arboretum for 35 years and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Research on this project extended over a three-year period and involved travel to eastern China (fall of 1989) and to South Carolina.
He helped develop supporting evidence for the theory that the ginkgo's characteristic vile–smelling fruits are a mechanism to attract ingestion by carnivores, aiding the tree's propagation via scat, and developed experiments confirming that all aspects of the ginkgo's sexual reproductive cycle are strongly influenced by temperature.
[5] Del Tredici also consulted for a French subsidiary of Schwabe Pharmaceutical which markets ginkgo–leaf extract as a memory aid.
While Del Tredici applied his expertise on the botanical side of the operation, he was skeptical that the products are effective, and noted that rather than deriving from ancient Chinese medical wisdom, the idea of ginkgo as an effective health agent "began in a board room in Germany in the mid–1960s" and has resulted in "a big cash cow".