The digital revolution empowers food system stakeholders to improve the resilience, sustainability, and profitability of food and agricultural systems. Agricultural data science leverages novel algorithms, dynamic and machine learning models, and other digital tools to improve supply chain transparency, optimize resource use, and address systemic bottlenecks in food and agricultural systems. These heterogeneous data come from low-cost sensors, IoT devices, unmanned aerial systems or satellites, on-farm machinery, and public economic, environmental and social datasets. Through hardware and software engineering we develop autonomous robots and decision tools, while working on usability, interoperability, connectivity, and other emerging technological challenges in agriculture.
Faculty
Dennis Buckmaster
Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering; Dean's Fellow for Digital Agriculture
Research Areas
Data generation, flow, and use in decision making Digital agriculture primarily with machinery, cropping, and livestock applications including computation, connectivity, and communication. Open source work through www.oatscenter.org. https://engineering.purdue.edu/~dbuckmas
Somali Chaterji
Assistant Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Innovatory for Cells and Neural Machines (ICAN) straddles the domains of digital agriculture (IoT & scalable databases) and computational biology (ML for genomics & cell engineering), both of which use applied machine learning, scalable databases and cloud/edge computing. https://schaterji.io
Keith Cherkauer
Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Hydrology and Water Resources Engineering. Integration of field based observations, remote sensing products and, hydrology and crop models into a digital ecosystem that can be used to enhance sustainability in the face of environmental change. http://www.agry.purdue.edu/hydrology
Bernard Engel
Glenn W. Sample Dean of Agriculture; Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Information Systems Soil and Water Resource Engineering. Hydrologic/water quality model development and application at field to watershed scales, groundwater modeling, environmental decision support systems, GIS, simulation. https://ag.purdue.edu
Margaret Gitau
Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Water Resources and Ecohydrologic Engineering: integrated (hydrologic, water quality, statistical) modeling; climate, land use/land management impacts; data-driven approaches for water resources decision making and management. http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mgitau/
Jian Jin
Associate Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Plant phenotyping sensors systems development, along with machine vision, electronics, statistics, machine learning automation and robotics and their applications in plant phenotyping activities.
Ankita Raturi
Assistant Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Agricultural Informatics: human-centered design, information modeling, and software engineering for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems. Digital Ag applications in field and cove crops, specialty crops, livestock, and food systems. http://aginformaticslab.org/
Karthik Sankaranarayanan
Assistant Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Applied data science for enzymology. We develop computational models for enzyme reaction chemistry to make experimentally testable predictions for addressing manufacturing challenges associated with complex synthetic molecules that are important to the society (e.g., pharmaceutical agents, agrochemicals, and food flavoring). https://www.ksankargroup.com/
Dharmendra Saraswat
Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Precision/Digital Agriculture - Remote sensing and Internet of Things (IoT) for managing plants/animals, development of spatio-temporal/machine learning models for site specific plant management, and decision support tools for natural resources management. https://dad.saraswat.rcac.purdue.edu/
Robert Stwalley
Clinical Associate Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Design of Specialized Machines and Systems for Agriculture: Precision Livestock Instrumentation & Nano-Climate Control; Fresh Water Access for Developing Areas; BioEnergy & Energy Systems; Off-Road Equipment Design; Social Implications of Engineered Systems; Equity in STEM Education.
Mohit Verma
Associate Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Engineering microbiomes. Field-deployable paper-based microfluidic biosensors for animal health and human health, in vitro models for studying host-microbiome interactions, ecological rules of life, soft materials and devices. https://www.vermalab.com
