Center Affiliates

A

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Algorithms and computational complexity; computed imaging systems; computer vision and pattern recognition; embedded, real-time, and hybrid systems; image, video, and multimedia processing and compression; machine learning; natural language processing; robotics and motion planning; speech recognition and processing

Department: Plant Biology
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Plant physiological and molecular responses to global change; photosynthesis and carbohydrate metabolism

Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Learning-based information extraction, remote sensing, digitization, and automated inspections.

Department: Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Agricultural automation, Internal combustion engines & after treatment systems, Powertrain electrification, Machine systems modeling, analysis, & control

Department: Veterinary Clinical Medicine
Affiliation: Faculty

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Parallel and distributed computing, parallel algorithms, performance modeling and optimization, motion planning, robotics, computational biology, computational geometry, animation, CAD, VR.

Department: Agricultural & Consumer Economics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Natural Resource Economics, Bioeconomics, Ecosystem Services, Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems

B

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Mining

Department: Extension
Affiliation: Center Affiliate
Research Interests: 4-H Youth Development

Department: Communications
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Communication and Health Equity, Health Communication, Risk Communication, Media Effects

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Bohn breeds corn lines that contribute to economically efficient and sustainable, high-yielding production. He studies the genetic basis of biotic and abiotic stress responses, root development, and grain processing characteristics of corn using innovative, high-throughput phenotyping tools and genomic information.

Department: Extension
Affiliation: Center Affiliate
Research Interests: Agronomic management of commercial corn, soybean, wheat and forage production systems, precision farming and agricultural technology applications, Extension’s distance diagnostics system General information regarding corn, soybean, wheat, alfalfa and forage production

Department: Animal Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Statistical and computational biology, high-throughput phenotyping, causal inference, machine learning, multi-omics data integration, computational applications for data collection, management, and security

Department: Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Policy; trade; development

Organization: National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Affiliation: Internal Center

C

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Caccamo research interests are centered on the area of embedded systems. He has worked in close collaboration with avionics, farming, and automotive industries developing innovative software architectures and toolkits for the design automation of embedded digital controllers, and low-level resource management solutions for real-time operating systems running on multicore architectures. More recently, he has begun to investigate real-time, security, and robustness problems in the software architecture of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Caesar’s research focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation of distributed systems and networks on the extremely large scale, with an emphasis on network operations, measurement, and availability. I am particularly interested in improving availability and performance of the Internet infrastructure, including routing, DNS, and data centers.

Department: Plant Biology
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Control of sugar allocations to improve crop yield or biomass for food and biofuels

Department: Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Chowdhary is advancing how to design, build, and automate collaborative aerial and ground robotic systems. He advances machine learning and decision-making algorithms to enable drones and ground robots to collaboratively manage agricultural tasks. His work improves the robustness of robots utilized in fields, for agriculture, defense, home-land security, and remote environment exploration.

Department: Animal Sciences
Affiliation:Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Immunophysiology and Behavior and Production and Environment Management

D

Department: Agricultural & Consumer Economics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Environmental economics in general and the impact of climate change on agriculture, food security and the global supply chain in particular.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Davis uses innovative modeling tools to identify and test new management strategies to make cropping systems more productive, profitable, and environmentally friendly. His research on integrated weed management provides farmers tools to reduce their reliance on herbicides. His group’s data-mining analyses present new ways for farmers to improve yield resilience in a changing climate.

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Computers and education; incentivizing productive student behaviors; open source curricula; assessment; learning analytics

Department: Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Neutron detection, spectroscopy, dosimetry, and imaging. Detection systems and unmixing and unfolding algorithms for homeland security, safeguards, and nonproliferation. Radiation protection of the patient in radiation therapy.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Diers develops new soybean varieties and germplasm to help meet the growing global demand for protein and vegetable oil. He advances knowledge in soybean breeding and genetics by identifying genetic diversity using modern genetic tools with a goal of improving economically important traits in the crop.

Department: Animal Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Dilger conducts interdisciplinary research involving nutrition, immunology, and neuroscience. Working with pig and chicken models, his research solves practical nutrition issues faced by modern animal agriculture, and use of a translational pig model to study early-life effects of nutrition on the microbiome, immune system, and brain to improve both human and animal health and well-being.

Department: Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Bioimaging at multi-scale

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Driggs-Campbell research focuses on developing tools for autonomous robotics that operate out in the real world with people. I draw from the fields of human-robot interaction, optimization, learning & AI, and control theory.

E

Department: Crop Sciences
Research Interests: Predictive Modeling, Systems Genetics, Association Genetics, Statistical Genetics, Genomics, Biometry, Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Big Data, Machine Learning

G

Organization: Illinois Corn Growers Association
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Dr. Diers develops new soybean varieties and germplasm to help meet the growing global demand for protein and vegetable oil. He advances knowledge in soybean breeding and genetics by identifying genetic diversity using modern genetic tools with a goal of improving economically important traits in the crop.

Department: Physics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Particle physics

Department: Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Green advances our understanding of animal husbandry issues in order to address production and sustainability challenges. Using a systematic “speaking animal” approach to explore the interactions of animals with their environment, she designs housing systems and management strategies to simultaneously promote animal welfare and more efficient resource utilization.

Organization:Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Grift develops robotics and sensing technologies that aid agriculture with efficiently reaching its production potential while minimizing its environmental impact. The grand challenge is to set humanity on a trajectory where it can feed itself sustainably, indefinitely, and from renewable sources alone.

Department: Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Guan provides solutions for real-life problems, such as large-scale crop monitoring and forecasting, water management and sustainability, and global food security. He uses satellite data, computational models, field work, and machine learning approaches to address how climate and human practices affect crop productivity, water resource availability, and ecosystem functioning.

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: I work on computer vision, robotics and machine learning.

H

Department: Coordinated Science Laboratory
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Dr. Hart research interests include projects with experimental design and development of system prototypes involving automated visual inspection systems, novel video and imaging camera technologies, embedded microcontroller systems, information technology and wireless sensor systems, electromechanical equipment designs, and biomimetic robotics. Development of prototypes in the laboratory and system testing through field research and on-site implementation.

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Research interests lie in robot planning and control, a field devoted to providing the decision-making capabilities needed for robots and other intelligent agents to perform complex physical tasks.

Department: School of Information Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Designing, building, and testing a suite of automated and semi-automated methods to explore, understand, characterize, and predict real-world data by means of statistical machine learning.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Regenerative agriculture

Department: Education
Affiliation: Center Affiliate
Research Interests: Dr. Hegeman-Davis plays a leadership role in the K-12 Computer Science Education Program. In this role she manages development of a new secondary endorsement in CS Education and the first pre-service licensure program in the State of Illinois.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Hind examines how the plant immune system detects pathogenic bacteria that cause diseases on tomato and other vegetable crops. Her research contributes to the understanding of plant-microbe interactions and aids in the development of plants with enhanced resistance to infection.

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: My main area of research is computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Department: Mechanical Science and Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Hovakimyan research interests are in control and optimization, autonomous systems, machine learning, neural networks, game theory, and their applications in aerospace, robotics, mechanical, agricultural, electrical, petroleum, biomedical engineering, and elderly care.

Department: Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: My research focuses on topics important to the agricultural sector including technology and innovation, dynamic decision making, and the role of cooperatives in the economy.

I

Department: Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Agricultural & Industrial Safety and Health in Agriculture

J

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Natural Language Processing and its connections with Data Mining, Social Science and Vision.

Department: Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment
Affiliation: Faculty

K

Department: Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Sustainability of bioprocessing technologies, optical sensing technologies such as NIR spectroscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy and Hyperspectral imaging, real-time quality assessment/control of bioproducts/bioprocesses, machine learning in agriculture, organic compound based nanozyme for biosensing

Department: Agricultural & Consumer Economics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Natural resource and environmental economics, technology adoption, agro-environmental policy analysis

Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research Interests: Energy-Water-Environment Sustainability Sustainable, Resilient Infrastructure Systems, Water Resources Engineering and Science

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

Department: Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Decision and Control Systems, Design and Manufacturing

Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Kumar’s research deals with Hydrocomplexity, the quantitative understanding and prediction of emergent patterns of form and function that arise from complex non-linear multi-scale interactions between soil, water, climate, vegetation, and human systems; and how this understanding can be used for innovative solutions to water and sustainability challenges. He has made extensive, deep, and signature contributions pertaining to Critical Zone science for intensively managed landscapes, biosphere-hydrosphere interactions, multi-scale variability of hydrologic processes, hydro-geomorphology, hydroinformatics, and information theory in geosciences.

Department: Computer Science Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Interactive computing; data-drive design; design mining; user-centered machine learning; UI/UX; mobile/web applications; social networks; fashion; emoji

L

Department: Plant Biology
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Integrative plant physiology; genetics and genomics; plant water use efficiency; photosynthesis and carbon metabolism; crop responses to elevated CO2; drought; temperature and ozone; crop sustainability and responses to global environmental change

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Lee improves perennial grass production systems for sustainable biomass and bioenergy feedstocks. His research focuses on increasing genetic and abiotic stress tolerances of perennial grasses. He is finding new ways to integrate perennial grasses into row cropping systems to improve sustainability, ecosystem services, and water quality.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Lipka accelerates the development of high-performing crops by identifying specific DNA regions associated with agronomically important traits. He uses statistical approaches for quantitative genetic analyses in crops.

Department: Bioengineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests:Dr. Lu’s research focuses on the analysis, modeling, and construction of microbial gene circuits for uncovering biological design principles and advancing biotechnological applications.

M

Department: Food Sciences and Human Nutrition
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Madak-Erdogan improves the quality of life for postmenopausal women and breast cancer survivors by understanding how diet and nutrition affect hormone action. Her lab uses multiscale modeling of –omics data from patient samples, animal models, and cell lines to understand the molecular basis of metabolic regulation by nuclear receptors and therapy resistance.

Organization: National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Affiliation:Internal Center
Research Interests:With a background in biophysics and computational biology, Dr. Mainzer is currently studying performance of high-throughput bioinformatics workflows on computer clusters.

Department: Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Scientific Machine Learning, Process Intensification, Multiphase Heat and Mass Transfer

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Margenot addresses the literal foundation of all cropping systems: soils. He is advancing how we monitor and manage soils as natural capital. His research team evaluates how human activities can enhance or compromise soil services to human societies, with an emphasis on food security from urban and rural agroecosystems in the U.S. Midwest and East Africa.

Department: Integrative Biology
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Integrative modeling to investigate the multi-scale regulation of crop response to genetic and environmental perturbations.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Martin improves long-term profitability and stability of cropping systems by exploring applications of quantitative methods on big data. He leverages interdisciplinary efforts to expand the frontiers of agricultural research; investigates quantitative methods on processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales; and studies effective approaches to implement new insights and discoveries in agricultural decisions and operations.

Organization: Animal Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. McCann current research goal is to leverage new nutritional insights to improve the efficiency, sustainability, and profitability of feedlot cattle operations. Ongoing research includes: determining rumen degradable protein requirements in growing cattle, evaluating changes in feed intake pattern during the finishing phase, understanding susceptibility to ruminal acidosis, describing the effect of implants on muscle development, and evaluating dietary transition protocols for cattle onto finishing diets.

Organization: National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Artificial intelligence; data and information systems

Department: Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Michelson studies the dynamics of poverty and food security in low-income countries where market failures are a fact of life. One of her key subjects is the interaction of international development efforts with local and large-scale agribusiness. She investigates how small farmers respond to the expansion of international supply chains, the sourcing of agricultural products, and the buying and selling of agricultural inputs.

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Architecture, compilers, and parallel computing; programming languages/formal methods/software engineering; security and privacy

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Mitra research focuses on developing algorithms and software tools for safe autonomous systems. We use techniques from theoretical computer science and control theory.

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Moose discovers genes that influence corn and related bioenergy grasses response to nitrogen supply. He develops new approaches to increase crop yields with lower input costs and helps mitigate environmental issues associated with nitrogen fertilizer. His work reveals how genes cooperate to control plant traits important to both productivity and nutritional quality.

N

Department: Journalism
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Ng research areas include journalism, communication technology, and social media. Methodologically, she takes a hybrid approach that combines big data, machine learning, as well as survey, and experimental research on media platforms. Her current research seeks to extend the diffusion of innovations theory by studying social media users’ post-adoption behavior and examining the mechanisms that drive user discontinuance and readoption.

Department: Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Mechatronics; control systems; expert systems; decision analysis; adaptive systems; deep learning; machine learning; robotics; systems engineering; autonomous/unmanned systems

O

Department: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Networks and Supply Chains; Logistics Systems; Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems; Renewable Energy Systems, Traffic Flow Theory and Operations; Sensor Network Systems; Safety and Econometrics

P

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Computational biology and medicine; functional and structural genomics; systems biology; pharmacogenomics; neurodegenerative diseases; machine learning; deep learning; reinforcement learning; applications to biology and cheminformatics

R

Department: Computer Science, Agricultural & Biological Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Deployment of embodied AI in agriculture, circular bioeconomy in agriculture, precision agriculture technologies, agricultural robotics and autonomy, and automation of agricultural and biological systems

Department: Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Rodriguez specializes in biological system modeling, simulation, and analysis. He works to ensure that complex food and agricultural systems can operate efficiently, with minimal wastage, while managing costs for the benefit of both society and the environment.

Department: Animal Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Rodrigues-Zas is helping find ways to prevent and cure diseases in both livestock and humans. She uses biostatistics and computational approaches to identify biomarkers and molecular pathways associated with health, reproduction, and performance in livestock species, and cancers in humans.

S

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Machine learning; computer vision and pattern recognition

Department: Crop Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Plant protection; entomology

Department: Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Precision agriculture, remote sensing, geospatial computation, and computer vision.

Department: Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Medicine; plant biology; energy; climate change

Department: Pathobiology
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Smith research focuses on epidemiology, specifically the mathematical and statistical modeling of disease, with an emphasis on control. Dr. Smith is particularly interested in the ways that data can be used for real-time response to disease.

Department: National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Data fusion; geospatial data science; remote sensing; social sensing; surface temperature; sustainability; urban GIS

Organization: University of Illinois Extension
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Indoor air quality; energy management; water quality

Department: Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Data analytics

Department: Crop Science
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Dr. Studer improves the efficiency and productivity of cereal crops by optimizing photosynthesis and water use. His research helps develop crops that are resilient to climate change and meet the needs of growers at the regional, national, and international levels.

Department: Advertising
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Su’s research focuses on examining the interplay between media and society, particularly how social media and new technologies influence human communication and social behaviors in the context of scientific and health topics. Her research has appeared on New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Science Communication, and Science and Public Policy among others.

T

Department: Agricultural & Biological Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Automation-Culture-Environment oriented Systems (ACESys) analysis methodology and Concurrent Science, Engineering, and Technology (ConSEnT) decision support computational platform

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty Affiliate
Research Interests: Large scale data mining and machine learning, especially for graph and multimedia data with applications to social networks analysis, healthcare, cyber-security and e-commerce.

U

Department: Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences
Affiliation: Internal Center
Research Interests: Dr. Ugarte research focuses on understanding the effects of soil management practices on soil quality and function. Dr. Ugarte is especially interested in studying the dynamics of soil food webs and their influence on soil ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and the regulation of population densities of deleterious soil organisms. Our ability to gain insight on these relationships and processes is fundamental to improving soil management and ensuring sustainability of our natural resources. My work includes basic and applied research at different scales (e.g., experimental and replicated trials, on-farm research) at the regional and national levels in agronomic and natural systems.

V

Department: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Coding theory and applications; communications; fault tolerance and reliability; image, video, and multimedia processing and compression; information theory; machine learning and pattern recognition; nanotechnology; signal detection and estimation; signal processing; VLSI in communications

W

Department: Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Wander works with farmers, educators, and policymakers to quantify the benefits of diversified and organic production, precision conservation and woody perennial polycultures, and determine how standards, voluntary marketing, and decision support tools can encourage soil stewardship.

Organization: Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment
Affiliation: Internal Center

Department: Food Science & Human Nutrition
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: The development of novel biosensors to address food-safety issues; the design and fabrication of advanced materials-based active/intelligent packaging; the synthesis and characterization of functional foods

Department: Computer Science
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Meta-learning, open-world, multi-modal, few/low-shot, and self-supervised learning, 3D vision, generative modeling, predictive learning, human motion prediction for human-robot interaction, reinforcement learning, robot skill learning, in-the-wild applications in robotics, autonomous driving, agriculture, materials science, chemistry, healthcare, etc.

X

Department: Food Science and Human Nutrition
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Dr. Xu’s research interests are mainly focus on developing an integrated program that applies advanced data science technologies including AI for improving food processing, developing novel and value-added food products, enhancing food safety, and mitigating waste for a sustainable food system.

Y

Department: Plant Biology and Geology
Affiliation: Faculty
Research Interests: Terrestrial biogeochemistry; ecosystem ecology; stable isotope ecology; soil-atmosphere greenhouse gas dynamics; climate change

Center Affiliates

A

Narendra Ahuja

Elizabeth Ainsworth

Mohamad Alipour

Cody Allen

Brian Aldridge

Nancy Amato

Shadi Atallah

B

Arindam Banerjee

Mark Becker

Cabral Bigman-Galimore

Martin Bohn

Dennis Bowman

Tiago Bresolin

David Bullock

Maxwell Burnette

C

Marco Caccamo

Matthew Caesar

Li-Qing Chen

Girish Chowdhary

Isabella Condotta

D

Sandy Dall'Erba

Adam Davis

Neal Davis

Angela Di Fulvio

Brian Diers

Ryan Dilger

Iwona Dobrucka

Katherine Driggs-Campbell

E

Elhan Ersoz

G

Laura Gentry

George Gollin

Angela Green-Miller

Tony Grift

Kaiyu Guan

Saurabh Gupta

H

John M. Hart

Kris Hauser

Jingrui He

Emily Heaton

Raya Hegeman-Davis

Sarah Hind

Julia Hockenmaier

Naira Hovakimyan

Jared Hutchins

I

Salah Issa

J

Heng Ji

Chongya Jiang

K

Mohammed Kamruzzaman

Madhu Khanna

Megan Konar

Sanmi Koyejo

Girish Krishnan

Praveen Kumar

Ranjitha Kumar

L

Andrew Leakey

D.K. Lee

Alex Lipka

Ting Lu

M

Zeynep Madak-Erdogan

Liudmila Mainzer

Amir Malvandi

Andrew Margenot

Amy Marshall-Colon

Nicolas Martin

Josh McCann

Kenton McHenry

Hope Michelson