Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture

Michael C. Ferris holds the Jacques-Louis Lions Professorship, the John P. Morgridge Chair, and the Stephen C. Kleene Professorship of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He is the Director of the Data Sciences Hub within the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, England in 1989.

Dr. Ferris' research is concerned with algorithmic and interface development for large scale problems in mathematical programming, including links to the GAMS and AMPL modeling languages, and general purpose software such as PATH, NLPEC and EMP. He has worked on many applications of both optimization and complementarity, including cancer treatment planning, energy modeling, economic policy, traffic and environmental engineering, video-on-demand data delivery, structural and mechanical engineering.

Ferris is a SIAM fellow, an INFORMS fellow, received the Beale-Orchard-Hays prize from the Mathematical Programming Society and is a past recipient of a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He serves on the editorial boards of Informs Journal on Computing and Optimization Methods and Software.

Abe Stroock is the Gordon L. Dibble '50 Professor and William C. Hooey Director of the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. He is also an associate director of the Cornell Initiative for Digital Agriculture. His research relates to engineering microchemical processes with an emphasis on transport phenomena, thermodynamics, and physiology. Current topics in his lab involve the development of tools with which to manipulate metastable states of liquid water for the pursuit of fundamental questions in physical chemistry, plant physiology, and environmental transport and with applications in heat transfer and environmental sensing. He obtained his BA in Physics from Cornell in 1995 and his PhD in Chemical Physics in 2002 from Harvard University. He received an MIT Technology Review TR35 Award and an NSF CAREER Award.

Ed Mabaya is a scholar and a development practitioner with more than two decades of experience working on development, agribusiness value chains and food security issues with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a Research Professor in the Department of Global Development and Senior Research Associate in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. His teaching, research and outreach work focuses on food security and economic development in Africa. Previously he was the Division Manager of Agribusiness Development at the African Development Bank (2018-2020) where he managed continent-wide investments, partnerships and research in support of the Feed Africa strategy. During his tenure at AfDB he launched a flagship program – Digital Ag - to support investments, policy reform and scaling up of digital solutions serving smallholder farmers in Africa. Mabaya’s applied research work is anchored around food marketing and distribution, enabling environments for agribusiness, seed systems, digital solutions for smallholder agriculture, and the role of efficient agricultural markets in Africa’s economic development. Mabaya is the former President of African Association of Agricultural Economists (2017-2019) an Archbishop Desmond Tutu Leadership Fellow (2007) and The Aspen Institute’s New Voices Fellow (2016). He earned his MSc (1998) and PhD (2003) degrees in Agricultural Economics at Cornell University and a BSc Honors in Agricultural Economics and Extension (1994) from the University of Zimbabwe.

Petersen explores design and coordination of bio-inspired robot collectives and their natural counterparts. She graduated from Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in 2014, completed a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in 2016, and started the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab in 2016 as part of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Cornell University. Petersen’s research was ranked among Science Magazine’s Top 10 Scientific Achievements of 2014, she was among Robohub’s Top 25 Women in Robotics to Know About in 2018 and received the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering in 2019.

Sarah Pethybridge is an Associate Professor of Plant Pathology & Plant-Microbe Biology at Cornell AgriTech in Geneva, New York. She works in research and extension with the New York broad-acre vegetable industries towards improved disease management. Her area of expertise is quantitative epidemiology and disease management. She received her Bachelor of Agricultural Science and Honors and Doctor of Philosophy in Plant Pathology from the University of Tasmania, Australia. Sarah joined Cornell University six years ago prior to a 10-year career as an Extension Plant Pathologist at the University of Tasmania, Australia, 5 years as Agricultural Research and Development Manager for the Australian Pyrethrum Industry, and 2 years as a Science Group Leader (Field Crops) for the New Zealand Institute of Plant and Food Research. A theme of Sarah’s work across the hemispheres has been developing digital agriculture tools for plant pathologists and broad-acre farmers.

Phoebe Sengers is an associate professor in Information Science and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. Her work integrates ethnographic and historical analysis of the social implications of technology with design methods to suggest alternative future possibilities. She leads the NSF project, “Understanding and Improving the Social Impact of High-Bandwidth Farm Networking Infrastructure.” She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Theory from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Steven J. Thomson is National Program Leader (NPL) with the USDA National Institute Food and Agriculture (NIFA). He engages Universities, other federal agencies, and industry to provide national leadership in Capacity and Competitive Grant programs. Research, Education, and Outreach programs he leads focus on engineering processes to improve systems relevant to agriculture. These include Engineering for Agricultural Production Systems, and NSF-collaborative programs such as the National Robotics Initiative, Cyber-Physical Systems, and AI Institutes. Dr. Thomson has background in aerial application of crop protection materials, irrigation management, water balance and crop modeling, decision support systems, sensing systems and electronics, precision agriculture and remote sensing, applied statistics, and agricultural safety. Dr. Thomson was a Lead Scientist with the USDA ARS before joining USDA-NIFA in 2016. He has authored or co-authored over 100 publications, two book chapters, and several Extension publications and software. While with USDA ARS, he also secured external funding from the Mississippi Soybean Board in the area of crop protection