Clinical Assistant Professor of Digital Agriculture & Computational Biology
Department of Crop Sciences
About Me
My current research program focuses on improving the sustainability and climate resilience of cropping systems for agriculture, leveraging technological advances such as AI and synthetic biology. Before my current appointment, I had a varied career across appointments in industry and academia. Most recently, I was a technical lead at X the Moonshot Factory, formerly Google[x], overseeing projects integrating AI methodologies in gene discovery and innovative plant utilization. My prior positions at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) include my appointment at the Center for Digital Agriculture as the Associate Director of Educational Programs and Adjunct Lecturer for the Department of Crop Sciences. My entrepreneurial endeavors include the foundation of the Umbrella Genetics Foundation and its start-up counterpart, as well as my efforts as a technical subject matter expert consulting various start-ups and technology companies.
My Research Interest
Despite being a prime target for new technology development and adoption, industrial-scale agricultural operations are highly susceptible to “technology inertia”. This term captures the resistance or delay in adopting new technologies or methods, often due to existing habits, economic limitations, or lack of education and training.
Farmers are often unfairly accused of being resistant or being skeptical of new technologies, often out of a preference for more traditional methods or concerns about the potential negative effects of technological advancements.
Infact, this resistance is often due to gaps in technology insemination and lack of subsidy structures and educational programs that would support and enable farming communities to afford, learn and adopt new practices.
Many farmers operate on slim margins, trying to balance the costs of production against unpredictable revenues. Farming margins being small is a result of a combination of factors, both inherent to agriculture and influenced by external market, economic, and policy forces. There are at least 12 different factors that contribute to the current undesirable state of farming margins, which can best be considered as externalities, and can be modeled as a complex adaptive system.
Complexity theory, often associated with the broader field of complex systems, studies how relationships between parts give rise to the collective behaviors of a system and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment. This theory embraces the idea that complex phenomena emerge from a few simple behaviors and are governed by feedback loops, wherein the output is recycled as input. It acknowledges that complex systems are dynamic, nonlinear, adaptive, and sensitive to initial conditions, often exhibiting properties that cannot be predicted, reduced, or easily simplified.
By leveraging insights from complexity theory, stakeholders in agriculture can craft more effective strategies to introduce technological changes, ensuring that they are not only technically feasible but also socially and economically sustainable. This holistic approach acknowledges the intricate web of factors that contribute to technological inertia and provides a roadmap for navigating and overcoming these challenges.
My research program focuses on system scale modeling of agricultural systems as complex adaptive systems, leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence methods and techniques to understand and propose ways to overcome technology inertia in farming and increase margins for farmers.
SanJose, CA 2023
Further reading on Complexity Theory and Complex Adaptive Systems
Complexity: A guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Capra & Luisi
Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level
by WIRED magazine
US Food and Agriculture System as a Complex Adaptive System
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