Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Global Food Security
Areas of Expertise
My background is evolutionary biology and specifically the behavioral ecology of parasites and ants. Mostly, I worked on the extended phenotype concept, which was put forward by Richard Dawkins. I worked on different models, such as Strepsiptera in wasps and ants, nematodes in ants, and fungi that manipulate ant behavior- 'zombie ants'.
But in the course of that work, I also did significant work on taxonomy, genomics, metabolomics, histology, ultrastructural morphology, machine learning to enable ant tracking, and some paleontology (which was fun).
Since starting PlantVillage in 2012, I have worked extensively on machine learning, specifically computer vision of crop diseases, but later extending to computer vision to enable dietary (with Aulo Gelli at IFPRI). I have worked extensively on climate science, especially adaptation and use of satellites and machine learning to understand soil moisture or both ground biomass (with Amulya Yadav and Chaopeng Shen at Penn State). I have also worked on the invention and development of mobile Pyrolosis systems (with Dries Roobroeck and Sheldon Inyana) and capture and storage of carbon in concrete (with Maa'va who worked with Penn State concrete researchers). As the Director of the USAID Innovation Lab (Current and Emerging Threats to Crops), I worked on (and oversaw) research on scaling solutions to global food insecurity. Given the focus on solutions, I then started PlantVillage+ Inc, a Delaware C Corp spun out from the university in 2024 (and part owned by Penn State). To enable co-operative structures and long-term public benefit, PlantVillage+ is being co-founded with Annalyse McCloskey.
More recently, and given my interest in PlantVillage/PlantVillage+ as a public good, I've become very interested in intellectual property arising from public funding , the organizational structures of corporations and particularly universities and worker cooperatives. Currently doing a study on the evolution of university systems with my alma mater, Oxford, as a case study and the nature of corporate bodies across time, including cooperatives.
