Abstract

In the more than three decades of my professional career, it has become clear that many of the world’s most urgent and challenging problems must be tackled by teams of people from multiple fields, often in an interdisciplinary environment. Although my earliest memories are based in agriculture, I never expected my career to eventually focus at the interface of engineering and agriculture. In this talk, I will share some of the high points of this journey, lessons learned, and future directions I plan to pursue.

Caught up by the early environmental movement, I received the BS and MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering, but pursued a PhD in Operations Research to advance my understanding of optimization and statistics – with a dissertation focused on estimation of air quality levels for implementation of the Clean Air Act. The importance of achieving depth of knowledge in a field, while working across disciplines and developing mutual respect within an interdisciplinary team became clear during my tenure as a faculty member in the IE/OR group in Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin. Modelling space-time processes evolved to statistical analysis of imagery to operating a receiving station for our own satellite data to a career focused on analysis of these data for environmental….and agricultural applications. I also learned that a “toolbox” of algorithms can provide a critical component, but cannot successfully navigate the road less traveled, particularly in remote places where it is most critical to observe “remotely”. Developments in sensing coupled with advances in computational resources now make it possible to acquire and to analyze the “Big Data” of our time to tackle problems in agriculture. I have had the privilege of collaborating with engineers and scientists from zoology to archeology, oceanography to forestry, statistics to plant science, and beyond. These are great times for an interdisciplinary career.

Biography

Dr. Melba Crawford is a professor of Agronomy and Civil Engineering, the Purdue Professor of Excellence in Earth Observation, the Director of the Laboratory for Applications of Remote Sensing, and the Associate Dean of Engineering for Research. Her research interests focus on development of advanced methods for image analysis and applications of these methods for land cover characterization, mapping, and monitoring. She is currently participating in a Purdue College of Agriculture initiative to develop advanced sensing technologies and algorithms for plant phenotyping. Dr. Crawford is a Fellow of the IEEE, and the immediate past President of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society. She was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin from 1980-2005, where she founded an interdisciplinary research and applications program in remote sensing. In 2004-2005, Dr. Crawford was a Jefferson Senior Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. She also served as a member of the NASA Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee and was a member of the NASA EO-1 Science Validation team, which received a NASA Outstanding Service Award.