Bioinformatics, Genomic, and Quantitative-Based Solutions for Food Security Under a Changing Climate

Cluster Goals

As the world’s population heads toward nine billion, climate change threatens a primary source of humanity’s food—plants. Changing environmental conditions directly and indirectly impact plant health and crop yields. Agriculture must evolve to enable long-term food security at household, national, and global scales. 

The cluster’s vision is to enhance food security by proactively developing climate-resilient crops that will stand up to future temperature, drought, salinity, pest, and disease challenges. It aims to accelerate genomics-based breeding of crop plants and intentional development of microbiomes that promote plant growth.

We’re building on the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s long-standing strengths in fundamental and applied plant sciences, microbiology, mathematics, computational sciences, and public policy by adding breadth and depth in cutting-edge technologies, including machine learning. We intend to weave education and outreach into everything we do to facilitate timely translation of research into real-world solutions applicable in Tennessee and beyond.

Cultivating Ideas

We’re building on our strengths across diverse fields, including:

• Bioinformatics and agricultural informatics
• Data and computational sciences
• Entomology
• Machine learning
• Mathematics
• Microbiology
• Genetic engineering and gene editing
• Genomics
• Plant pathology
• Plant science
• Public policy and outreach
• Quantitative climate change biology
• Soil science

Why UT?

We’re proud to work on this challenge at a flagship land-grant institution. We will leverage UT Extension connections to take our laboratory solutions into field trials and onto farms across Tennessee. We’ll seek out collaborations with other land-grant universities to translate our discoveries to meet needs across the country.

New cluster hires will join a thriving community of researchers with access to world-class facilities. We actively leverage the Plant Research Center’s interdisciplinary infrastructure as a launchpad for innovative cross-pollination, training, and center-scale proposal development. We will also collaborate with and tap resources from other UT units: the National Institute for Modeling Biological Systems (NIMBioS), the Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology, AI Tennessee, the UT One Health Initiative, and multiple genomic facilities. UT’s strong relationship with Oak Ridge National Laboratory provides the cluster with additional capabilities, including high throughput plant phenotyping. 

Cluster faculty will prepare graduate and undergraduate students for careers on the cutting edge of genomics, machine learning, and data science. From day one, new hires will help promote interdepartmental graduate student training and contributions to joint UT–ORNL programs. Over time, new hires will lead the development of an undergraduate agricultural bioinformatics major.