Principal Investigator
Dr. Kaitlin (Katie) Gold is an Assistant Professor of Grape Pathology at Cornell University where she holds the primary research and extension responsibilities for grape disease management for New York state. Katie’s research combines plant pathology, machine learning, and remote sensing to study the fundamental and applied science of plant disease sensing to improve early disease detection and sustainable integrated management. Katie leads the Grape Sensing, Pathology, and Extension laboratory at Cornell AgriTech (GrapeSPEC). Katie completed her PhD in Plant Pathology and MS in Applied Statistics concurrently at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2019, where her dissertation research pioneered the use of hyperspectral imaging for pre-symptomatic disease detection and diagnosis. Prior to starting her tenure-track position at Cornell, she held a visiting faculty fellowship at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA with the Carbon and Ecosystem Cycling and Imaging Spectroscopy Groups to use AVIRIS-NG hyperspectral imagery for asymptomatic grape disease detection and mapping. Katie hails from New Jersey and earned her Bachelors of Science in Plant & Agricultural Science from Rutgers University. In her free time, Katie and her husband Ben enjoy traveling, wine tasting, and fostering kittens for local rescues and animal welfare groups. Contact Katie by email at katiegold@cornell.edu.
Staff
Dave Combs is a Research Support Specialist in the Gold Lab and is responsible for anything and everything related to our 4 acres of pathology vineyards, including our annual fungicide efficacy studies for grapevine powdery mildew, downy mildew, black rot, and Botrytis bunch rot. Dave has vast field experience gained over his 26 years working for Cornell managing applied field programs ranging from tree fruit insecticide trials to vineyard fungicide trials. He is responsible for all applications, scouting, data collection, analysis and reports in the annual efficacy testing experiments. Dave is the ‘jack of all trades’ in the lab and pitches in where he is needed. This also includes precise image annotation for training the autonomous robot, lab ordering and inventory, greenhouse duties and field equipment maintenance and operation. Dave has robust background in viticulture and previously taught Integrated Pest Management at Finger Lakes Community College. Contact Dave by email at dbc10@cornell.edu.
Angela Paul is a Technician in the Gold Lab, who lends her diverse laboratory, greenhouse, and field experience to all aspects of Gold lab research. She earned her MSc degree from McGill University in Montréal, researching nutrient quality and it’s role in optimizing winter dormancy within day-neutral strawberries for Quebec’s growing strawberry industry. She also received her BSc degree in environmental science from Wells College in Aurora, NY. Angela is a native to New York, growing up in Oswego County, but has also spent time living in Canada and Ireland and has a passion for traveling and learning new languages. Outside of work, you’ll most likely find Angela at your local antique, book or craft store, hiking the nearby trails or at home playing through Skyrim for the nth time. Contact Angela by email at ap838@cornell.edu.
Postdocs
Dr. Rocio Calderon joined the Gold Lab as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in February 2020. She is the lead postdoc on the Gold Lab’s NASA funded project to build a global disease surveillance system for soilborne plant pathogens. This work entails linking remote sensing and atmospheric modeling tools with plant pathology/plant disease ecology and comparative genomics in order to develop a remote sensing framework for global disease surveillance and long range soil-borne dispersal with earth system and aerosol transport modeling. She completed her PhD in Biosciences at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in 2015, where her dissertation focused on the early detection of Verticillium wilt in olive using high-resolution hyperspectral and thermal imagery. Later, she was awarded a two-year postdoc grant at the University of Salford (UK) to conduct a research project about the development of automated methods for landscape-scale pre-visual detection of Xylella fastidiosa infection in olive using hyperspectral and thermal imagery and the optimization of early detection surveillance for Xylella fastidiosa outbreak in the European Union by incorporating epidemic spread modeling with remote sensing imagery. Rocio comes from Córdoba (Spain), where she obtained her BSE degrees in Agricultural and Civil Engineering and a MSc in the Design and Management of Agri-food Industries. Before joining the Gold Lab, she pursued a BSc in Mathematics at the Spanish Distance Education University (UNED). Rocio spends her free time traveling, attending music festivals, cooking and tasting beer and wine. Contact Rocio by email at rcalderon@cornell.edu
Graduate Students
Fernando E. Romero Galvan (Ferg) is a PhD student in the Plant Pathology and Plant Microbe Biology section at SIPS with the Gold Lab. Fernando’s research focuses on detecting, measuring, and predicting plant disease in vineyards at scale using imaging spectroscopy sourced from airborne and spaceborne instruments. Fernando completed his undergraduate degree in Geographic Information Science at California State University, Northridge in 2019, after which he joined the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an intern. At JPL, Fernando worked to communicate natural disasters as seen by the ECOSTRESS instrument led a research project to use Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging spectrometer (AVIRIS) data to measure mycorrhizae abundance in North American Forests. Here at Cornell, Fernando found his love for applications-driven remote sensing and chose to pursue a graduate program of study that would allow him to further investigate plant-microbe interactions with spectroscopy. Fernando is a master-ranked Starcraft 2 player, was born in Mexico City, and has been restoring a 1974 Volkswagen super-beetle since he was 16 years old which he hopes to one day use for his daily commute. Contact Fernando by email at fer36@cornell.edu.
Kathleen Kanaley is a PhD student in the Plant Pathology and Plant Microbe Biology section at SIPS with the Gold Lab. Kathleen is using satellite and drone imagery to develop remote sensing tools for early disease detection in Finger Lakes vineyards. Kathleen holds bachelor’s degrees in Natural Science and Spanish Literature from Fordham University. Prior to joining the Gold Lab, she worked as a conservation corps member in western Colorado, as a research intern at the Universidad de las Américas in Quito, Ecuador, and as a forestry aide for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Kathleen’s family grows grapes on Seneca Lake, where she spends her summers shoot-positioning, weed-pulling, and rambling through the vineyard. Contact Kathleen by email at kk697@cornell.edu.
Undergraduates
Somil Aggarwal is a senior at the College of Engineering, pursuing an honors degree in Computer Science. He joined the Gold lab in January 2021 and has since worked on two projects: updating DMCast, a downy mildew decision support tool, and grapevine variety discrimination with AVIRIS imagery. He is also the recipient of the CIDA Research Innovation Fund and ELI Wood Excellence Engineering grant for his research. Outside of the lab, Somil is the co-founder and CEO of an agritech start-up, Agcess, that provides precision agriculture insights to small farmers in order to bridge the technological gap between corporate and small farms. He is also an avid Bhangra dancer and competitor on the nationally-ranked Cornell team, a business associate with Cornell Consulting, a teaching assistant for CS 4700 (AI) and ORIE 3120 (Practical Tools for OR and ML). Contact Somil by email at sa748@cornell.edu.
Alumni
- Dr. Nikita Gambhir was a postdoc in the Gold Lab from November 2020 to February 2022. In the Gold Lab, she used in situ and proximal hyperspectral sensing to non-destructively monitor fungicide efficacy and activity in grapevine. Dr. Gambhir is now a Fungicide Discovery PI at FMC.
- Graham Trolley, Cornell ’21, was a member of the Gold Lab from August 2020-June 2021. As a senior undergraduate in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, he used AVIRIS-NG imaging spectroscopy to differentiate grapevine varieties across California. Graham is currently an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and will be joining Dr. Heidi Dierssen’s ocean imaging spectroscopy laboratory at UConn to pursue a MS in oceanography in Fall 2021.
- Josh Evans was a member of the Gold Lab from August 2020-June 2021. As a shared USDA technician with the USDA GGRU in Geneva, NY, Josh built Gold Lab’s QScout, a QGIS plugin for automated georeferencing of scouting data. Josh will pursue a doctoral degree in synthetic and molecular biology at Arizona State University beginning in Fall 2021.