Allison Chatrchyan

Dr. Allison Morrill Chatrchyan is a Research Associate in the School of Integrative Plant Sciences, Soil & Crop Sciences Section, at Cornell University and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Cornell Law School. As a social scientist, her work focuses on the interactions between social, legal, environmental, and agricultural systems. Dr. Chatrchyan facilitates interdisciplinary research and extension teams and develops resources, tools, and training programs on climate change science, impacts, adaptation, mitigation, and synergies.

Dr. Chatrchyan’s research is focused on assessing climate change impacts and adaptation gaps; stakeholder views and actions on climate change; and polycentric climate change governance (including laws, policies, institutions, and non-state actions at multiple levels). She co-developed and leads the Cornell Climate Smart Farming Program and Cornell Climate Stewards Program and has collaborated on several projects with the USDA NE Climate Hub since 2017.

Abe Davis

I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He specializes in computer graphics, computer vision, human-computer interaction (HCI), as well as a random sampling of other topics.

Ari Juels

Ari Juels is a Professor at Cornell Tech (Jacobs Institute) in New York City, which he joined in 2014. He was the Chief Scientist of RSA (The Security Division of EMC), Director of RSA Laboratories, and a Distinguished Engineer at EMC, where he worked until 2013. His recent areas of interest include cryptocurrency and smart contracts, applied cryptography, cloud security, user authentication, and privacy, among other things. He is Co-Director of the Initiative for CryptoCurrencies and Contracts (IC3).

Carla Gomes

Carla Gomes is the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science, the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, and co-director of the Cornell University AI for Science Institute. Her research area is Artificial Intelligence with a focus on large-scale constraint-based reasoning, optimization, and machine learning. Recently, she has become deeply immersed in the establishment of the new field of Computational Sustainability and in AI for Science.

Computational Sustainability is a new interdisciplinary research field, with the overarching goal of studying and providing solutions to computational problems for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. Such problems are unique in scale, impact, complexity, and richness, often involving combinatorial decisions, in highly dynamic and uncertain environments, offering challenges but also opportunities for the advancement of the state-of-the-art of computer and information science. Work in Computational Sustainability integrates in a unique way various areas within computer science and applied mathematics, such as constraint reasoning, optimization, machine learning, and dynamical systems. Concrete examples of computational sustainability challenges range from planning and optimization for wildlife preservation and biodiversity conservation, to poverty mapping, to combining (deep) data-intensive learning with inference, reasoning, and optimization to accelerate the discovery of new renewable materials such as solar fuels.

Candace Hulbert

Candace Hulbert works with AI-LEAF Institute and the Cornell Climate Smart Farming program as a program manager and education and outreach coordinator. Candace’s work with AI-LEAF centers around public engagement, stakeholder education, and extension related to Climate-Smart Agriculture, digital agriculture, and artificial intelligence in agriculture. Candace is leading efforts to conduct a AI-LEAF Needs Assessment to understand to to collect the views, experiences, and challenges and opportunities faced by relevant stakeholders to inform the development of new AI-driven decision support tools and technology. Additionally, as a part of her work in expanding workforce development with AI-LEAF Candace will serve as a site supervisor for the American Climate Corps/Working Lands Climate Corps. Candace received her MPS in Natural Resources and the Environment from Cornell University in 2023 and earned a BA in English and a BA in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 2020. From January 2021 to August 2023, Candace coordinated the Weather Ready Farms program at the University of Nebraska Extension. Candace’s research interests include climate-smart agriculture; dighttps://corpsnetwork.org/programs-initiatives/working-lands-climate-corps/ital agriculture, disaster preparedness and recovery; agricultural systems research; agroecology; voluntary participation research; environmental justice; and stakeholder engagement.

With AI-LEAF Candace hopes to amplify the voices of farmers, foresters, and extension educators in the development of climate-smart agriculture technology. She hopes to help foster the development of curriculum centered around climate change and artificial intelligence literacy for farmers and foresters.

Bharath Hariharan

Bharath Hariharan is an associate professor in Computer Science at Cornell University. He works on computer vision and machine learning, in particular on important problems that defy the “Big Data” label. He enjoys problems that require marrying advances in machine learning with insights from computer vision, geometry and domain-specific knowledge.

Volodymyr Kuleshov

Volodymyr Kuleshov is a Joan Eliasoph, M.D. Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell Tech and Cornell University. His research focuses on machine learning and its applications in science, health, and sustainability. It involves two high-level directions:

1) Core research in machine learning, specifically: generative models, probabilistic methods, approximate inference, decision-making under uncertainty

2) The development of machine learning techniques that support new technologies that improve human and environmental health. Previous projects focused on genome sequencing, machine reading, and reducing food waste

Vipan Kumar

Vipan Kumar is an Associate Professor of Weed Science and leads statewide weed science research and extension program in field crops in New York (NY). Prior to joining Cornell, He was an Assistant Professor at Kansas State University Agricultural Research Center in Hays, KS. His research program at K-State was focused on understanding the biology and ecology of most problematic weed species and developing integrated weed management (IWM) strategies for dryland agroecosystems in western Kansas and the High Plains region. The overall goal of his research program at Cornell University is to evaluate and develop cost-effective and sustainable integrated weed management (IWM) strategies for corn (field corn, sweet corn, silage corn), soybean, small grains (winter wheat, barley, oats) and alfalfa in the New York state and Northeast Region. His research program is also instrumental in better understanding of applied ecological/biological aspects of most troublesome weed species in the region.

Chuan Liao

Chuan Liao is Assistant Professor in the Department of Global Development at Cornell University. As an interdisciplinary sustainability and environmental social scientist, Chuan’s research interest lies at the intersection of environment, development, and justice. He develops and applies integrated approaches to study human-environment interactions by linking statistical, spatial, and other quantitative methods. He has worked on topics that include land tenure and land use change, dryland system sustainability, sustainable energy transition, and circular bionutrient economy.

Louis Longchamps

Louis Longchamps is an Assistant Professor of Digital Agronomy in the School of Integrative Plant Sciences’ Soil & Crop Sciences Section. He previously worked for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, where his research focused on the optimization of nitrogen management using remote sensing, and reduction in nitrous oxide emissions by variable rate nitrogen management. He was also co-leader of a Living Laboratory co-creating solutions with farmers to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture on the St. Lawrence River’s ecosystems. His research involves the development of precision agriculture using soil and crop sensing to improve input use efficiency in field crops. He is also conducting interviews and surveys to assess the current state of On-Farm Experimentation in NY State, as well as the needs in terms of digital technologies to enhance profitability and environmental stewardship.

Yiqi Luo

Yiqi Luo is a Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section. His research program is focused on predictive understanding of ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry under the global environmental change via data-model integration. Major issues include (1) how global change alters structure and functions of terrestrial ecosystems, and (2) how terrestrial ecosystems regulate climate change, addressed using experimentation, observation, data synthesis, modeling, data-model fusion, and theoretical analysis.

Christopher Matthew De Sa

Christopher De Sa am an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department at Cornell University. He is a member of the Cornell Machine Learning Group and he leads the Relax ML Lab. His research interests include algorithmic, software, and hardware techniques for high-performance machine learning, with a focus on relaxed-consistency variants of stochastic algorithms such as asynchronous and low-precision stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Markov chain Monte Carlo. His work builds towards using these techniques to construct data analytics and machine learning frameworks, including for deep learning, that are efficient, parallel, and distributed.

Ariel Ortiz-Bobea

Ariel Ortiz-Bobea is an associate professor in Cornell University Department of Economics. He is an applied economist with interests in agricultural, resource and development economics. At present, his research program is broadly focused on agricultural sustainability issues with particular emphasis on the statistical and econometric evaluation of climate change impacts on agriculture and other sectors of the economy.

Noah Snavely

Noah Snavely is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech interested in computer vision and computer graphics, and a member of the Cornell Graphics and Vision Group. He also works at Google DeepMind in NYC. His research interests are in computer vision and graphics, in particular in 3D understanding and depiction of scenes from images. Noah is the recipient of a PECASE, a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award, and is a Fellow of the ACM.

Ying Sun

Ying Sun is an Associate Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section.  Her geospatial sciences research focuses on understanding fundamental processes governing interactions between agroecosystems and climate at various scales.

Dominic Woolf

Dominic Woolf is a Senior Research Associate in the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section. His research aims to address these issues of how best to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. The main tools he uses involve quantitative modeling to provide improved understanding of processes, and improved analyses of impact at both the regional and global scales. He apples these analyses to inform policy decisions about the impacts and most appropriate choices of technology, land use and land management, taking into account economic and environmental trade-offs and synergies, particularly between food security and climate-change mitigation. The main foci of his research in recent years have included soil carbon sequestration; restoration of degraded land; sustainable management of landscapes to integrate climate-smart agriculture, agroforestry, soil and water conservation, and reforestation with non-timber forest products; biochar; and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.  His approaches to these systems have encompassed soil carbon modeling to better understand the processes underlying carbon stabilization; improved cost-effective and rigorous greenhouse gas inventories of national scale programs; techno-economic analysis of biomass conversion technologies; geospatial modeling and analysis of food-security interventions; and integrated assessment of biochar-bioenergy systems.

Fengqi You

Fengqi You is the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering at Cornell University. He is affiliated with multiple Graduate Fields at Cornell, encompassing Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Operations Research and Information Engineering, Systems Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Applied Mathematics. Within Cornell, he serves as the Chair of Ph.D. Studies in Systems Engineering, Co-Director of the Cornell University AI for Science Institute (CUAISci), Co-Lead of the Schmidt AI in Science Program, and Co-Director of the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA). Before starting his tenure at Cornell in 2016, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division and served as a faculty member at Northwestern University. His research focuses on fundamental theory and methods of systems engineering and artificial intelligence, with applications spanning materials informatics, smart manufacturing, digital agriculture, quantum computing, energy systems, and sustainability.

Lifen Jiang

Dr. Lifen Jiang is a Senior Research Associate at the Luo Lab in the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section. He work focuses primarily on biogeochemistry, global change ecology, and plant ecophysiology. Her past research was to explore carbon cycle as affected by forest succession and plant invasion. Her current research interest includes ecosystem responses to global change and uncertainty in modeling ecosystem carbon dynamics and model evaluations and improvements. Meanwhile, she has been serving as a lab manager for many years.

Yun Yang

Yun Yang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section. She worked as a postdoctoral fellow at USDA-ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing Lab and is currently an assistant professor at Mississippi State University. Her research program focuses on monitoring plant water use using remote sensing at field to global scales and understanding the impacts of agricultural practices on water resource sustainability. After joining Cornell, her research program will also work to improve our understanding of the interactions between soil health and plant water use. 

Michael Allen Gore

Plant Breeding and Genetics Section Head and Professor, School of Integrative Plant Science Plant Breeding and Genetics Section. Michael Gore is a professor of molecular breeding and genetics for nutritional quality and Liberty Hyde Bailey professor at Cornell University. He was selected as Fellow of the Crop Science Society of America in 2022.

The Gore lab combines quantitative genetics, genomics, analytical chemistry and remote sensing to elucidate the genetic basis of complex trait variation in various crops, including maize, oat, cassava, cotton, sorghum, industrial rapeseed, and guayule.

Lee Dunnigan

Lee Dunnigan is a graduate student in the Lehmann Lab in School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section.

Brendan Hogan Rappazzo

Brendan Hogan Rappazzo is a fifth year PhD student in Computer Science at Cornell University advised by professor Carla Gomes in the lab of Computational Sustainability.

Utku Umur Acikalin

Utku Umur Acikalin is currently a teaching assistant at Cornell while pursing his Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Computer Science.

Luke Michael Gregory

Luke Gregory is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell at the Gore Lab in the School of Integrative Plant Science Plant Breeding and Genetics Section. His work focuses on understanding the physiological constraints placed on plant performance by their growth environment.

Jacob Russell Boes

Jacob Russell Boes is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University in the Lehmann lab the SIPS Soil and Crop Science Department. He is currently involved in the modeling of nutrient bespoke biochars for the creation of environmentally sustainable fertilizers.

Pranjal Dwivedi

Pranjal Dwivdei is a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University .

Kostiantyn Viatkin

Kostiantyn Viatkin is a graduate student in the Lehmann Lab in School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section.

Victoria Mao

Victoria Mao is a graduate student working with Professor Carla Gomes. Her research interest include AI, combinatorics, and general problem solving. She was previously a part of Cornell’s International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).

Anmol Kabra

Anmol Kabra is a Computer Science PhD student at Cornell University, working on AI/ML for Science and Climate.

Haodi Xu

Haodi Xu is a graduate student in the Luo Lab in School of Integrative Plant Science Soil and Crop Sciences Section.

Marc Grimson

Marc Grimson is perusing his PhD in Computer Science at Cornell. He is broadly interested in artificial intelligence applied to computational sustainability questions, with a focus on optimization and deep learning as it relates to conservation and energy systems.

Akhilesh Sharma

Akhilesh Sharma is a doctoral student at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, with a background in engineering. His research is at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, and agriculture, focusing on the detection of various weeds and the analysis of herbicides using UAV imagery.

Hyung-Sub Kim

Hyung-Sub Kim is a graduate student in Dr. Yiqi Luo’s Eco Lab at the School of Integrative Plant Science. His work primarily focuses on ecosystem ecology, carbon and nitrogen dynamics, biogeochemistry and forest management.

Shreelekha Revankar

Shreelekha Revankar is a first-year PhD student at Cornell advised by Professor Kavita Bala and Professor Bharath Hariharan. She is currently interested in large-scale visual discovery and graphics.

Md Nasim

Md Nasim is a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell in the Department of Computer Science. He is advised by Professor Carla Gomes on researched related to AI for Climate Institute and Cornell University AI for Science Institute (CUAISci) in support of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship program.

Joshua Fan

 Joshua Fan is a fifth-year Computer Science PhD student at Cornell University, where he is advised by Professor Carla Gomes in the Computational Sustainability group. His research focuses on developing machine learning techniques for challenging problems in sustainability and agriculture.

Zherong Wu

 Zherong Wu is currently a Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) and AI for Science Institute (CUAISci) at Cornell University. Her research focuses on exploring innovative satellite remote sensing and earth system modeling technologies, together with deep learning analytics to monitor urban geohazards, explore terrestrial carbon dynamics, and advance sustainable development goals.

Yingheng Wang

Yingheng Wen is a second-year PhD student of Computer Science at Cornell, as well as a Cornell Presidential Life Science Fellow advised by Professor Carla P. Gomes. His current research interest lies in artificial intelligence (AI) with its applications in natural science, life science, and sustainability

Delia Qu

Delia Qu is a PhD student at Cornell studying computer science with a focus in AI.

Sophia Lundberg

Sophia is an undergraduate student working with Johannes Lehmann, Allison Chatrchyan, and Candace Hulbert. Sophia studies Design and Sustainability and has been working with AI-LEAF and Cornell Climate Smart Farming on agriculture stakeholder research education, outreach, and extension since the Summer 2024.

Isabella Paganin Newlands

Isabella Paganin Newlands is a New York University graduate and Working Lands Climate Corp Fellow who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies with a focus in data science. Isabella is currently completing a service year under the guise of AI-LEAF and Cornell Climate Smart Farming. Isabella is passionate about creating a more sustainable and equitable future through a transdisciplinary lens that incorporates art, writing, data science and programming.