Research Themes
Five research areas spanning plant-soil and plant-soil-microbe interactions, hydrology and water quality, AI for Science and environmental data science, Earth System Modeling, and Decision Support Systems for digital agriculture and precision conservation.
Plant-soil & plant-soil-microbe interactions
Building multi-scale plant-soil and plant-soil-microbe interaction models, integrated with multi-omics and meta-omics data, to understand the synergies and trade-offs among plant and microbial traits and their effects on crop water-use efficiency (WUE) and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) — work designed to connect with advanced breeding and bioengineering programs.
Field-to-watershed hydrology & water quality
Combining high-frequency IoT sensor networks with UAV and satellite sensing to reveal spatial patterns in hydrology and water quality, and building next-generation field-to-watershed models to understand how field-scale conservation practices scale up to watershed-level outcomes.
AI for science & environmental data science
Applying state-of-the-art AI and machine learning to crop, soil, and environmental science — including LLM-based multi-agent systems for scientific reasoning, reinforcement learning for decision-making, knowledge-guided machine learning and differentiable models, and deep learning for remote sensing and geospatial big data analytics.
Agriculture in the Earth system & sustainable agrifood systems
Improving how agriculture and human management are represented in Earth System Models, to assess land management strategies and quantify the water (blue, green, and gray) and carbon footprints of agricultural production from regional to global scales.
Digital agriculture & precision conservation
Building digital solutions that support decision-making in agriculture and conservation — combining geospatial data science, process-based and data-driven modeling, and decision support systems to deliver real-world tools for growers and land managers.
Tools & methods
Field and lab measurement · Process-based and computational modeling (hydrological, cropping system, ecosystem, Earth system) · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Remote sensing · Geospatial big data