About Agriculture & Engineering Collaborative Initiative

The Ag-Eng (Agriculture & Engineering Collaborative Initiative) program is a recurring effort by the Purdue University Colleges of Agriculture and Engineering to identify new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between their faculty. An internal competitive seed grant system focuses on assembling teams of faculty from both colleges who have not previously worked together, and funding them to work on projects, with an emphasis on the following central themes/challenges:

  • Protecting and conserving water, natural resources and the environment while increasing agricultural (food/forest) production
  • Energy efficiency in agriculture and advances in bioenergy
  • Biomanufacturing processes to convert sustainable biomass into new products, providing an alternative production method for chemicals, medicines, fuels, materials, alternative foods and other products
  • Improving yield potential of animals and plants, as well as their respective production systems
  • Refining agricultural (food, forestry, etc) supply chains to reduce waste, improve food safety, improve nutrition, and better meet the needs of a growing population
  • Insights into the basic biochemistry and/or physiology of agriculturally relevant organisms, or of living things in general

And potential technologies for addressing these issues:

  • Imaging and visualization
  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI)
  • Data science, computation, and analytics
  • Sensing and communications
  • Autonomous systems
  • Materials and materials properties
The awards are intended to serve as seed money to help the newly-assembled teams of researchers obtain preliminary data and establish a track record together in order to make them more competitive for outside funding.