Dr. Dani Jones received her B.S. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering with an emphasis in operations research from Mississippi State University. She earned her PhD in Biological and Agricultural Engineering with a concentration in energy systems from Texas A&M University. Before becoming a faculty member, she was a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University. At North Carolina State University, she is a Research Assistant Professor in Biological and Agricultural Engineering, a faculty fellow in the Center for Geospatial Analytics, and a graduate faculty in the Operations Research Program. She also holds a joint faculty appointment with the Operations Research and Analysis Group at Idaho National Laboratory.  

Juliana started working on her Phd in Operations Research at North Carolina State University in Fall 2019.  Juliana has a Bachelors of Engineering in Control and Automation Engineering and a Bachelor of Science and Technology from the Federal University of ABC in Santo André, Brazil. She is applying an integrated model to solve for the Traveling Salesman Problem and the Coverage Planning Path Problem for prescribing crop spray paths to UAVs. She is also part of a project to pelletize a new variety of Miscanthus grown in North Carolina. 

Started working on her PhD in Biological & Agricultural Engineering and joined the Sweet-APPS team in August 2021. Shana is analyzing sweetpotato growth patterns throughout the growing season, identifying key environment factors, and predicting the ideal harvest time. By combining operations research, data analytics, and machine learning, she is aiming to enhance the entire sweet potato production process, from supply chain management to harvesting strategies. Previous to NC State, Shana worked in a structural biology lab as a senior data tech at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute at Duke University. At Duke, she applied machine learning to HIV and SARS Cov2 D614G variant research and gained a better understanding of protein structures and machine learning in the biosciences. She is originally from North Carolina, earned a BS in pure Mathematics from Fayetteville State University, and an MS in Applied Math from NC Central University. 

Leticia is a PhD student in Bio logical & Agricultural Engineering, working with Dr. Dani Jones and Chris Reberg-Horton. In addition to having these 2 co-mentors, she works with researchers from USDA and USGS on a weekly basis. Her research projects revolve around evaluating the potential for using satellite imagery and machine learning to quantify the extent and distribution of crop residue cover on known agricultural fields across the US. In addition to her research projects, she is a Data Science Academy Consultant for agriculture-related questions coming from the NC State research community. She received her B.S. in Agronomy from São Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil), in 2018, and her MS degree in Plant Production in 2020, also at UNESP, in partnership with Kansas State University, where she specialized in nematode management with alternative control and precision agriculture. To further expand her expertise, Letícia pursued a second MS degree from Louisiana State University, where she applied her knowledge on machine learning algorithms to predict crop yield under different cover crops.  

Scott is an M.S. student who is part of the Sweet-APPS team. He is also a precision agronomist at Scott Farms Inc. since 2018. Prior to his current role, Scott was an Agronomy and Soil Science Manager at Soil Plus for 10 years and an Agronomist at Total Agronomy Services for 2 years.  He holds a Bachelor's in Soil and Water Systems from North Carolina State University and is certified as an ASA Crop Advisor, NC soil scientist, NC pesticide applicator, and Virginia nutrient management planner. Scott has vast experience with GIS Management, Drone/UAV use, image analysis of nutrient deficiency and stress indicators, database management, ArcGIS, pest control, agriculture, data collection and farming. 

Carmella is a part of the IDEALS Lab Sweet-APPS team. She currently attends North Carolina State University, where she is a rising junior in Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence.  Her primary responsibility was spearheading data automation initiatives by wrangling data covering over 10,000 acres of farmland. Utilizing her skills in programming languages R and Python, as well as digital environments such as RStudio, Google Colab, and Jupyter Notebook, she is working with John Deere API systems to develop and deploy automated data organization scripts. This effort resulted in an increase in office productivity and operational efficiency in acquiring data from our industry partners. Additionally,  she designed an intuitive user interface, ensuring easier comprehension of intricate processes by individuals with diverse technical backgrounds. She hopes through her work  in the lab; she can bring positive improvement to the agricultural sector. 

Tasmin embarked on her Ph.D. journey in Biological & Agricultural Engineering at NC State in August 2019. Her dissertation, "Biomass Supply Chain Modeling and Development for Cellulosic Based Biofuel Production," offered a comprehensive analysis of the biomass supply chain, focusing on its utilization for energy and bioproducts. Enhancing her academic experience, Tasmin undertook an internship at Idaho National Laboratory, contributing her skills during the summer and fall of 2022. This pursuit followed her prior academic accomplishments: obtaining both a B.S. and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, laying a solid foundation for her advanced studies in Biological & Agricultural Engineering.

Shelly, during her tenure as an M.S. student, collaborated with the Sweet-APPS team. Concurrently, she honed her practical skills through an internship with the SAS AgTech Team while pursuing her MS degree. Her thesis, entitled "A Data Processing, Feature Engineering, Variable Selection, and Machine Learning Modeling Framework for Predictive Agriculture," delved into the intricate relationships between sweetpotato morphologies and a spectrum of environmental factors (such as precipitation, soil type and content, temperature) as well as agricultural practices (including fertilizer application, planting/harvesting schedules, crop variety, and pesticide use). Shelly's academic journey includes earning a B.S. in Biological & Agricultural Engineering in May 2020, followed closely by a second B.S. in Mathematics in December 2020.

 Ashley comes from a long line of farmers and grew up on a commercial corn and dairy farm in southern Ontario, Canada. She received her BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona and an MS in Biology from Western Carolina University. During her graduate studies, she focused on plant conservation and ecology by creating a predictive model to determine suitable habitat for an endangered species. Ashley has diverse experiences across hardware engineering, natural resource management, plant science and conservation, and corporate sustainability.

Lily was part of the Sweet-APPS team and collected data using weather stations, and soil and moisture sensors located in strategic fields managed by our partners at Scott Farms. During her summer research experience, Lily gained valuable insight on 1) the day-to-day operations during the planting and growing seasons, 2) the logistics from field to the packing facility and through the sorting activities, and 3) best practices for data collection and data sharing between the precision agronomist at Scott Farms and the NCSU research team. Lily received her BS in Biological & Agricultural Engineering in May 2023. 

Jason was a part of the biofuel logistics research team and was using extensive datasets to collect information on major biomass crops. Jason earned a BS in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Renewable Electric Energy Systems on May 2023. Jason was also involved in Agricultural Economics research on migrant farm workers in Spring 2021. Jason was also a Power Delivery intern at Kiewit in Summer 2022.

Chris worked on a semester-long project training neural networks to recognize different types of sweet potato roots. He earned his BS in Biological & Agricultural Engineering with a concentration in Bioprocessing. As a four-year member of the entrepreneurial village, he hoped his project could help farmers incorporate intelligent technology into their farming practices to reduce waste and increase yields. .

Fernando was an agricultural engineering  student in the Catholic University of Paraná in Brazil and was working in the Ag & Bio Laboratory during the Fall 2021 semester. He analyzed the public cropland data layers for multiple years to gain a better understanding on crop rotations for fields that produce sweetpotato.  

Emory was a part of the Sweet-APPS team and helped collect data on the various steps of the sweetpotato supply chain from planting to packaging. This information included equipment and labor processing times, equipment specifications, labor costs, labor hours, among others. Emory earned her BS in Biological & Agricultural Engineering with a concentration in Bioprocessing. She was a Goodnight Scholar Ambassador and had a diverse professional experience including performing qualitative and quantitative research on student interventions, cryo packaging research for temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals and consumer industry research.

Carly was analyzing large output datasets for biomass feedstock analysis from different econometric, optimization, and simulation models. Carly earned her BS and MS in Biological & Agricultural Engineering, in addiition to a minor in Biomanufacturing . In summer 2020, Carly interned at Novozymes in the fermentation process engineering group. She was also the president of the American Society of Agricultural & Biological Engineers (ASABE) Chapter in North Carolina State University in 2020.