Purdue University College of Agriculture

It wasn’t until a minute into the phone call that Ankita Raturi understood she was not simply being considered for the Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Food – she’d already won. “I definitely cried,” Raturi said, of learning she’d been given an award. “You know how you feel seen sometimes. That’s how it felt.” Raturi, an assistant professor in agricultural and biological engineering who runs the Agricultural Informatics Lab, specializes in an area that was once slightly obscure – the junction of open access technology and food systems. But in recent years the area has gained more attention, with Raturi as a community steward. Her current work includes development of open source support tools for farmers, toolkits for local food systems, and landscape assessment methods for biodiversity projects. The award will help her continue her upward trajectory.

Imagine you’re a landowner with dozens or hundreds of mature hardwood trees — not a stretch, since the majority of forestland in the U.S. is privately owned. If you want to know the trees’ value, you’ll need to hire a professional forester. What if, before you start working with the foresters, you could gain preliminary information about the trees’ value and other features with your phone? That’s the hope behind iForester, an app developed by Purdue’s Song Zhang, a professor of mechanical engineering, and Cheryl Quian, a professor in industrial design, in collaboration with Songlin Fei, director of the Institute for Digital Forestry.

Purdue University’s College of Agriculture recently welcomed Ignacio Ciampitti, an internationally renowned expert in quantitative agronomy, as the new co-director of the Institute for Digital and Advanced Agricultural Systems (IDAAS) and professor in the Department of Agronomy.