Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry
Empowering resilient solutions rooted in data
Cluster Goals
Climate change, population growth, and economic forces are among the most urgent threats to the world’s agriculture and forestry systems. Scaling up strategic adoption of climate-smart practices will lead to resilient systems that are sustainable in every sense—environmentally, socially, and economically.
The complexity of competing and intersecting pressures on agriculture and forestry systems demands bold transdisciplinary solutions. The Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry cluster employs data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to harness massive amounts of experimental data generated by our experts in agriculture, forestry, engineering, and economics.
Together we will develop next-generation concepts, models, and tools to predict trade-offs of specific technologies and identify best practices at the landowner and landscape scales. Our work will ultimately inform climate-smart decisions and strategic policies to make life and lives better—on farms, in communities, and globally.
Smart Synergies
We’re connecting researchers with diverse areas of expertise, including:
- Computer science
- Soil science
- Forest management
- Biosystems engineering
- Industrial and systems engineering
- Circular bioeconomy systems
- Agricultural and resource economics
- Agricultural supply chains
- Decision sciences
Ready to take the next step?
Why UT?
Tennessee’s flagship land-grant university, UT has a strong foundation in developing climate-smart solutions based on field and lab experimental research. The Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry cluster is strategically expanding capabilities to gather data from many disciplines, integrate it at the systems level, and use it to reshape the future of food, fuel, and fiber production. Emerging federal innovation programs are focusing on high-tech agricultural solutions, so as the cluster grows it will be well positioned to pursue highly competitive research proposals.
UT’s computer science and mathematics faculty are addressing a broad spectrum of related AI and machine learning technologies. Their algorithms, computing platforms, and models underpin our vision to transform agriculture and forestry into resilient high-tech enterprises. We will also collaborate with the UT-led AI Tennessee Initiative.
Cluster faculty will partner with multiple research centers, including the Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology, the Center for Profitable Agriculture, the Center for Renewable Carbon, and the Data Science Institute for Machine Learning and AI. We’ll work with UT AgResearch to develop solutions and leverage statewide AgResearch and Education Centers to provide experiential learning for students. We’ll also work with UT Extension to disseminate knowledge and tools based on our work to farmers, forest owners, and policymakers.
UT’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs will play a key role as the cluster addresses questions that can help landowners and policymakers implement best practices and design regulatory and economic infrastructure that advances climate-resilient solutions.
Join Our Academic Community
Explore the links below to learn more about open positions. Contact the faculty lead if you don’t see an open position aligned with your skill set or if you’re a current UT faculty member who wants to get involved.
Hiring Units
- Herbert College of Agriculture
- Tickle College of Engineering
- Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs
Cluster Positions
Filled
Dale Manning Associate Professor
Focus: Decision sciences at the food-energy-water nexus
Hiring Units:
Planned
Full Professor
Focus: Artificial intelligence in agriculture and forestry
Hiring Units:
Filled
Sathishkumar Samiappan Assistant Professor
Focus: Agricultural informatics
Hiring Units:
Planned
Assistant Professor
Focus: Climate-smart circular bioeconomy systems
Hiring Units:
Planned
Assistant Professor
Focus: Biomass industrial ecology
Hiring Units:
Meet Our Cluster Community
Faculty Lead
Jie Zhuang
Professor of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science, Herbert College of Agriculture
Phone: 865-974-9467
Email: jzhuang@tennessee.edu
Faculty
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Research Assistant Professor & Assistant Director, Smith Center for International Sustainable Agriculture
population dynamics of rural communities, sustainable agriculture development for smallholder farmers, nutrition sensitive agricultural approaches for development
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Assistant Professor, School of Natural Resources
natural resources economics, international trade of forest products, carbon pricing mechanisms, international forestry, applied econometrics
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Professor & Department Head, Agricultural and Resource Economics
farm business management, risk management for crop and beef cattle producers
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Distinguished Professor, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science
agricultural, environmental engineering, precision livestock farming
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Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
AI for future mobility, sensor-rich autonomous driving and mobility
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Professor & Department Head, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science
sustainability, circular economy
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Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
land conservation strategies for the protection of ecosystem services
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Professor, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science
microbial ecology, biodegradation, decomposition
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Associate Professor, Computer Science
genome-focused bioinformatics, high-throughput and parallel computing, life science applications
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Assistant Professor, Biosystems Engineering & Soil Science
flooding, water quality trends, disaster dynamics, water resources modeling, geospatial analytics, data science
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Chancellor’s Professor, John D. Tickle Professor, and James G. Gibson Professor
climate change, air quality, and energy using environmental modeling and large-scale simulations
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Assistant Professor, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science
sensing and control in smart agriculture
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UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Environmental Biotechnology
basic and applied field microbial ecology, especially as it relates to bioremediation, biofuels, enhanced oil recovery, and water quality
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Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
human exposome, environmental health, environmental microbiology
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Assistant Professor, Plant Sciences
physiological, biochemical, and molecular aspects of fruit production in controlled or protected environments
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John D. Tickle Professor & Department Head, Industrial & Systems Engineering & Director, Institute for a Secure & Sustainable Environment
sustainability, climate change, optimization, transportation and logistics, supply chain, additive and smart manufacturing, energy efficiency
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Associate Professor, Industrial & Systems Engineering
Markov decision processes, dynamic programming, predictive analytics, reinforcement learning, time series analysis, anomaly detection
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Assistant Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
transportation, environmental, and climate policy
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Goodrich Chair of Excellence in Civil Engineering
biogeochemical processes in soil, sediment, subsurface and water environments
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Associate Professor, Baker School of Public Policy & Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
environmental and natural resource economics and policy, natural resource valuation, natural resources, livelihoods
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Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
demand analysis, international trade, agricultural policy, global food demand, US and Tennessee export competitiveness, applied time series analysis
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Assistant Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
environmental and resource economics, production economics and applied econometrics
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Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
developing accelerated applications for computational chemistry and biology using high performance reconfigurable computing platforms
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Professor, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science
coupled carbon and nitrogen cycles, carbon sequestration, climate change, stable isotopes, soil ecology, soil biogeochemistry, soil health
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Assistant Professor, Computer Science
neuromorphic computing, spiking neural networks, evolutionary and genetic algorithms, machine learning on high-performance computing
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Associate Professor, Economics
behavioral and experimental economics, environment and natural resources, public policy
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Professor, Agricultural and Resource Economics
corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat marketing and farm bill policy
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Professor, Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science
environmental soils: no-till, cover crops, soil health, climate change
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Institute Professor, Food Science
chemistry, processing, and value-added utilization of oilseeds, cereal, egg, dairy, and other agricultural products or by-products, primarily for their lipid components
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Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Geography
geospatial data science and open-source software development, with a research focus on utilizing big geospatial data and cloud computing to study environmental changes, particularly in surface water and wetland inundation dynamics
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Professor, Plant Sciences
fertility/nutrient management in rotational cropping systems, sustainability of various row crop production strategies, variable input and precision applications to optimize crop productivity and nutrient use efficiency, and development and evaluation of innovative plant nutrition products
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Associate Professor, Animal Science
precision poultry farming that addresses challenges in poultry production regarding smart sensoring, robotics, behavior monitoring, welfare assessment, airborne transmission of pathogens, environment management