On any given day in Indiana, you will find farmers checking weather apps before sunrise, monitoring equipment diagnostics from their phones, and analyzing yield maps long after the combine has shut down. Agriculture has always depended on experience and instinct. Today, it also requires data. At Purdue University, that change is being addressed by the Institute for Digital and Advanced Agricultural Systems (IDAAS), led by co-directors Dennis Buckmaster, professor of agricultural and biological engineering, and Ignacio Ciampitti, professor of agronomy.

Before Megan Casey was studying post-wildfire flooding, she was a teenager at camp, learning how ecosystems work and imagining how they could be protected.

“I realized I wanted to go into agricultural engineering when I was around 16 years old,” she says. “That was really my first experience that this could be something that I could do.”

That curiosity led to a career tackling one of today’s toughest challenges: understanding how landscapes change after disruption.

There were more than 1,000 crashes involving vehicles equipped with automated driving systems or Level 2 advanced driver assistance systems in the first half of 2025, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Whether on highways or farms, automated systems must remain safe despite sensor failures, GPS disruptions, network dropouts or even cyber-attacks.

That’s why Purdue University is leading CHORUS, a multi-institution research center funded by a $7 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, to build resilience into cyber-physical systems (CPS). The name is inspired by the Egyptian god Horus, who symbolizes protection from disasters, with the “C” added to emphasize the center’s cyber focus.

A research team at Purdue University’s colleges of Agriculture and Engineering aims to ensure the security of the nation’s corn crops by using artificial intelligence as an early warning system.

The team is using cutting-edge technological advances and research infrastructure to pursue the project with a nine-month, $450,000 contract from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The number of explosions is slightly below the 10-year national average of 8.5 and down from the nine that occurred in 2024. Even though there were fewer explosions, the number of injuries and fatalities increased compared to two injuries and no fatalities in 2024.

When Jason Thiagarajan was weighing his college options, he wasn’t sure how he would pay for school, or which university would best prepare him for life and career. That uncertainty disappeared the day he opened his acceptance letter to Purdue University.

Inside was an invitation to join the inaugural cohort of the Lilly Scholars at Purdue (LSAP), a program that covered his full tuition and created a direct talent pipeline to one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. For Thiagarajan, a junior in agricultural and biological engineering from Bloomington, Indiana, it was the clarity he had been seeking.

Somali Chaterji leads a team that has developed AGILE3D, a cutting-edge 3D object detection system. She is an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering in Purdue’s College of Agriculture and College of Engineering and holds a courtesy appointment in the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

When Lana Malek left Hoe, Slovenia, for West Lafayette, Indiana, she wasn’t just choosing a university — she was stepping into an entirely new world. As the first person in her family to pursue higher education outside of Slovenia, the decision to study in the United States came with excitement, uncertainty and ambition in equal measure.

Karthik Sankaranarayanan trained in two quite different scientific subfields as a graduate student and as a postdoctoral researcher. Now at Purdue University, he aims to combine those fields in a project that will use artificial intelligence to plan the synthesis of complex new pharmaceutical agents.

“Nature uses enzymes to effortlessly produce her complex small molecules. The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly interested in using enzymes to synthesize molecules that may be challenging to produce using traditional organic chemistry,” said Sankaranarayanan, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering. With that in mind, he will design an AI algorithm to sift through the diverse set of enzymatic reaction chemistries that nature uses to produce molecules.

For Andrew Monnin, a student from Cicero, Indiana, Purdue Agriculture felt like the right fit from the start. Planning to graduate in December 2026, he is majoring in agricultural systems management (ASM) with a concentration in agrosecurity.

“I chose Purdue Agriculture because of its internationally recognized status and the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest experts in the world,” he said. “When I discovered the agrosecurity concentration, I knew ASM was the major for me. It combines my fascination with complex agricultural systems and my interest in safety and security, all while providing the hands-on learning experiences I love.”

He describes the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) as a place where faculty are approachable and invested in their students.