Ankita Raturi Wins Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Food

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.

The $100,000 Maxwell/Hanrahan Awards in Food “provides unrestricted awards to mid-career individuals working in the United States with meaningful, real-world and hands-on experience in food.” Up to five of the awards are given annually by the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting “scientists, teachers, conservationists and creators.”

“Ankita’s work to improve both resilience and sustainability in food and farming systems has the power to reset how we grow and create access to healthy food,” says Rachel Strader Chen, executive director of the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation. “We congratulate her and welcome her to this year’s cohort for Awards in Food." 

Raturi plans to use the award to cultivate research and community efforts that she and her research team believe can have long term impact to improve resilience in food systems and sustainability in agriculture. 

Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department Head Nate Mosier joined in praising Raturi’s commitment. “Dr. Raturi is a great example of a land grant university professor whose new discoveries fuel the education of the next generation and translate into practical applications that changes lives and livelihoods. Agricultural and biological engineering is proud to be the home for the Agricultural Informatics Lab at Purdue.”

Raturi has always been a community-builder, says Juliet Norton, who met Raturi in graduate school and now works as a researcher in her lab.  “She’s great at connecting folks with each other and highlighting where that connection can really gain traction and create some good and meaningful projects,” says Norton, who was interviewed by the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation as part of the award process.

One way Raturi finds and connects with the people that she seeks to serve is through the Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology (GOAT), a community she co-founded in 2018. Their biannual “unconference” brings together farmers, scientists, computer experts and others to brainstorm ways of making the technology that runs our food systems more open and equitable.

“If you’re working with her, she really helps you see the pathway through the complexity and the mess, and she really always has that bigger vision in mind,” Norton says.

Raturi says her interest in community-facing work was inspired by her parents. She grew up between Kenya and Papua New Guinea, where her mother was a chemistry teacher-turned-expert in online education, and her father was a physics professor. Much of her father’s career involved working with villages and islands in the South Pacific to build energy capacity and energy resilience. Both parents were deeply community involved. As a teen, Raturi would serve as tech support for her father’s Rotary Club chapter and her mother’s Soroptimist (a women’s service club) chapter.

“They were very inspirational,” Raturi says. “Service has been a really big theme in my life entirely because of them.”

After attending college between Fiji, Australia and Canada, and getting a PhD at UC-Irvine, Raturi went to work at the USDA’s Sustainable Agricultural Systems Lab. She had no thoughts of joining academia until, at a GOAT conference, she met Purdue’s Dennis Buckmaster, currently a professor of agricultural and biological engineering and a dean's fellow for digital agriculture. Buckmaster told her about Purdue’s land grant mission and about its Open Ag Technology and Systems Center (OATS), then the only such center of its kind. He encouraged her to apply to a job opening; Raturi has been at Purdue since 2019.

As excited as she is about the award, Raturi says she feels a bit awkward being singled out. “Science is not solitary, it’s collaboration,” she says. “You get an award because of the groups that have been working with you.”