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
Associate 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.
Upinder Kaur
Associate Professor, Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Research Areas
Robotics, precision agriculture robotics.
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
