As of Fall 2019, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Purdue University.
My research is in Agricultural Informatics, in particular, human-centered design, information modeling, and software engineering, for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems. My current research is on: the development of modular, open source, decision support tools; designing a reconfigurable data pipeline for on-farm participatory research; and information modeling for the development of domain-relevant data services.
I can be found plotting on the Gathering for Open Ag Tech forums, and and contributing to the Open Technology Ecosystem for Adaptive Management, Precision Sustainable Agriculture, and the Open Ag Tech and Systems Center collaboratives.
My goal is to design algorithms, methods, and tools that empower decision makers – from farmers and consumers, to researchers and policy makers – to create sustainable food systems.
Postdoctoral work. From 2018-2019, I was with the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Lab at USDA ARS and the Center for Environmental Farming Systems at NC State, where I worked on cover crop decision support tools and development of an information ecology for sustainable agriculture. I was responsible for the development of a suite of cover crop decision support tools; information architectures for a large-scale participatory research project; and the architecture of a geoinformatics pilot project as part of a public-private partnership between the tech sector and ARS. I continue to work in the cover crop domain to shape the cover crop user experiences, improve data and tool interoperability, and establish data management best practices. You can follow our continued collaborations at Precision Sustainable Agriculture.
Graduate research. I received my PhD in Software Engineering from the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, where I took a human-centered approach to the design of a Modeling Sustainable Systems (MoSS) framework for representing complex, adaptive, agricultural systems. You can download my dissertation here.
My Masters in Information and Computer Sciences was also from the Informatics department at UC Irvine. My work looked at energy footprinting and visualization in networked environments, and you can find my thesis here.
Prior education. Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems from the The University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji.