Professional Experience

Assistant Professor, Biological Systems Engineering, Washington State University; Affiliated Faculty, Center for Precision and Automated Agricultural Systems (January 2015-)

Research and extension program focuses on “Sensing and automation technologies for site specific and precision management of production agriculture”. Special emphasis is towards integration of  Remote Sensing (Unmanned and Manned Aerial Systems), Ground-based (Proximal) Crop Sensing, Decision Support Systems and Information Delivery Technologies, Precise Applications of various Production Inputs, Agricultural Machinery and Processes, and Data-based Modeling.

Assistant Research Professor, Biological Systems Engineering, Washington State University; Affiliated Faculty, Center for Precision and Automated Agricultural Systems (June 2013 –December 2014)

• Research Interest: Agricultural Automation Engineering and Food Engineering with major focus towards applied sensor technologies in agricultural production and post-harvest handling and processing.
• Agriculture Production: Precision Farming, Crop Sensing and Decision Support Systems, Sustainable Agricultural Production Technologies Development, Spray Technology.
• Food Quality and Safety: Chemical & Optical Sensor(s) Systems.

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Citrus Research and Education Center, University of Florida. (July 2009 – May 2013)

• Sustainable agricultural production technologies: R&D on in-field thermal treatment system for economical reduction of inoculum in huanglongbing (HLB)-infected citrus trees, UAV based low altitude high resolution imaging for early HLB disease detection in citrus orchards.
• Variable rate spray technology: R&D on axial-fan airblast sprayer retrofit for precision citrus spraying, design and conduct field experiments, data analysis, reports and publications.
• Ultra-low volume and thermal foggers: design and conduct field experiments for efficacy evaluation of spraying equipment to be used to control sandfly in military environment, LiDAR based 3D spray plume visualization and droplet dispersion assessment in stable and unstable micro-meteorological conditions, LiDAR data mining, feature extraction, statistical analysis, reports and publications.
• Citrus yield and fruit quality assessment: R&D on LiDAR based bulk fruit volume-mass estimation techniques, Photo-synthetically Active Radiation (PAR) sensors based citrus yield estimation, LiDAR and visible-near infrared spectroscopy based fruit quality monitoring systems development, field testing, reports and publications.
• Site specific nutrient estimation and plant stress detection: Characterizing oil palm leaf nutrients and ‘Ganoderma’ disease using optical sensors (GreenSeeker® 505, SPAD-502Plus, Multiplex® 3, ASD spectroradiometer, IR-spectroscopy, FTIR), develop decision support through soft computing (pattern recognition, feature extraction and classification).

Graduate Research Assistant, Bio-imaging and Sensing Center, North Dakota State University (Jul 2006 – Jul 2009)

• Polymer based chemometric and piezoelectric sensors R&D for monitoring volatile biomarkers (VOCs).
• R&D on custom e-nose systems for detecting low concentrations of VOCs specific to Salmonella contamination in packaged beef.
• Pattern recognition: Wavelet based feature extraction and artificial neural network based learning for packaged beef spoilage and contamination detection.

Graduate Research Assistant, Iowa State University (Jan 2005 – May 2006)

• Sensors fusion: Development of Extended Kalman filter based sensor fusion algorithm using various navigational sensors for agricultural vehicles localization.
• Modeling of 4WS/4WD AgRV platform for dynamic behaviour and stability assessment using Matlab® Simulink and SimMechanics toolboxes.

Graduate Research Assistant & Research Associate, Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand (Jan 2003 – Dec 2004)

• R& D on simulation models of wheel-soil interaction using Discrete Element Method (DEM), model implementation in VB6.0 and SQL server, validation using laboratory experiments, data analysis, reports and publications.

Project Facilitation Team Member, NGO (Grass Roots Action for Social Participation) (June 2002 – Dec 2002)

• Worked on World Bank project to evaluate poverty in 40 villages (of rural central India) and developing sustainable co-operative projects to improve the livelihood of the farmers via. team building and self-help-groups formation.
• Management of project funds, coordinating between government, NGO, and villagers.

Programmer, I-Gen Software Pvt. Ltd., Maharashtra, India (Jan 2002 – May 2002)

• Development of user-friendly software (using VB 6.0 and SQL server) for co-operative sugarcane factory for centralized database management of famers’ sugarcane quantity and their billing cycles.