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 member in the Operations Research Program. She also holds a joint faculty appointment with the Economic and Operational Analysis Group at Idaho National Laboratory.  

Leticia is a PhD student in Biological and Agricultural Engineering, co-mentored by Dr. Dani Jones and Chris Reberg-Horton, alongside researchers from the USDA and USGS. Her research focuses on mapping inventories of conservation tillage on agricultural lands using satellite imagery and a low-cost, scale-neutral tractor-mounted camera system. By quantifying soil cover residue through remotely sensed data and machine learning techniques, Leticia aims to empower government agencies and agricultural stakeholders with high-throughput methods to measure, monitor, report, and verify tillage intensity practices on large-scale farms. These assessments have the potential to incentivize climate-smart practices such as conservation tillage and cover crops, thereby reducing agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

Leticia served as a Data Science Academy Consultant during her first year, addressing agriculture-related inquiries from the NC State research community. In her second year, she transitioned to providing data science support to extension agents. Leticia is a Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) Fellow, a Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) Fellow, and a FY24/25 CALS Graduate Peer Mentor at NC State University. 

She holds a B.S. in Agronomy and an M.S. in Plant Production from São Paulo State University, as well as a second M.S. from Louisiana State University, where she specialized in applying machine learning algorithms to predict crop yield under different cover crops.

Annelise is a PhD student in Biological and Agricultural Engineering. Her research aims to enhance profitability and sustainability in the sweetpotato industry by developing machine learning (ML) models and decision-support tools to optimize post-harvest outcomes. Focusing on reducing waste due to cosmetic imperfections, her work will leverage publicly available data (e.g., soil, environmental, and geospatial) and insights from partnered growers to create predictive models for sweetpotato grade and growth. By codifying grower mental models into computational frameworks using decision intelligence methodologies, she will improve decision-making, yield predictions, and crop management. Additionally, her research will incorporate data from Nash Produce's consignment sellers to refine and validate these yield models, with the goal of achieving 70% model accuracy and overall reducing industry waste. She holds a B.S. in Computer Information Systems and a B.S in Supply Chain Management from Appalachian State University, as well as a Agriculture Data Science Certificate from North Carolina State University. 

Laura is a PhD student in Operations Research. Her research aims to assess the transformation of manure from North Carolina's swine and poultry industries into valuable fertilizer by developing a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to identify the best technologies and strategies. She holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez, a Post-baccalaureate Certificate in Mathematics from Smith College, and an MS in Operations Research from North Carolina State University. Laura is also an EDGE alum and the Operations Research Graduate Student Association member.

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. 

Haley is pursuing a B.S. in Bio & Ag Engineering, with a concentration in Agriculture. She is contributing to a project focused on purpose grown energy crops—specifically switchgrass and willow. Her work involves gathering and synthesizing information on market opportunities, optimal farming practices, regional yield data, production costs, and energy balance. 

Ethan is pursuing a B.S. in Biological and Agricultural Engineering. He is contributing to a project that trains machine learning models to estimate tillage intensity in North Carolina and Texas. His work involves gathering and synthesizing satellite and drone imagery to identify crop residue in cotton farms.

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 (May-Dec). 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.

Shana analyzes sweetpotato growth patterns throughout the growing season, identifying key environment factors, and predicting the most profitable harvest time. By combining operations research, data analytics, and machine learning, her work enhances the entire sweetpotato production process, from supply chain management to harvesting strategies. Additionally, Shana is a Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) Fellow, and a FY23/24 CALS Graduate Peer Mentor at NC State University. 

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 Mathematics from Fayetteville State University, and an MS in Applied Math from NC Central University. 

Juliana started working on her PhD in Operations Research at North Carolina State University in Fall 2019. Juliana has a Bachelor's in Control and Automation Engineering and a Bachelor of Science and Technology from the Federal University of ABC in Santo André, Brazil. Her research is focused on optimizing the supply chain for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production in the United States. Her work specifically examines the potential of winter oilseeds—pennycress, camelina, and carinata—as viable feedstocks for SAF. By employing crop production forecasts and Mixed Integer Linear Programming models, she aims to identify strategic locations for processing facilities and biorefineries to minimize costs and enhance efficiency. During her PhD, she was an intern at Idaho National Laboratory in Summer 2023 (Jun-Aug).

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.

MC. Verónica Mariles received her B.S. in Territorial Planning from Universidad Autonoma del Estado de México. She earned her M.C. in Soil Science from Colegio de Postgraduados. She has 15 years as a researcher in INIFAP, mainly with GIS and remote sensing processing estimating vegetation cover (template and tropical forest, mangrove, crops) in Southern Mexico. She also has done activities with automatic weather stations, research on peasant´s soil classification; agave mezcalero production and lately, native maize characterization. In the IDEALS lab, Verónica will utilize her geospatial analytics skills to understand the rate of mangrove land cover change over the last 20 years in Oaxaca, Mexico.  

Maya is pursuing a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Computer Programming. She is currently contributing to a project focused on wrangling and tidying datasets to expand analyses related to logistics for sustainable aviation fuels. 

Keller Virgilio is studying Biological Engineering with a concentration in Agricultural Engineering at NC State. He is also an active member of the Engineering Village and the BAE Robotics Club. Prior to attending NC State, he conducted research in a microbiology lab, focusing on contamination testing and microbe isolation. During Fall 2024, he contributed to a project using satellite remote sensing to analyze crop residue cover and tillage intensity on the Delmarva Peninsula, working under the guidance of Ph.D. student Leticia Santos. In Summer 2025, he will join Oak Ridge National Laboratory as an undergraduate researcher through the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) Program, where he will develop a machine learning model for biomass pyrolysis.

Carmella joined the IDEALS Lab in the summer of 2023 while she was a rising junior in Computer Science with a concentration in Artificial Intelligence at North Carolina State University.   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. In May 2024, Carmella landed a year-round data science internship with SAS! 

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. She worked at Vick Family Farms after graduation.

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.