Noah Fahlgren, PhD
Noah Fahlgren, PhD, is a prominent scientist who leads the data science facility at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, where his work spans the cutting-edge intersections of high-throughput phenotyping, computer vision, machine learning, genomics, and computational biology. His journey into plant science began during his time as an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Jim Carrington’s lab at Oregon State University, coinciding with the revolutionary emergence of high-throughput DNA sequencing. Today, at the Danforth Center, Dr. Fahlgren’s team focuses on building innovative computational tools designed to bridge different fields of expertise and empower scientists to solve complex big data challenges. Notably, he is the pioneer behind PlantCV, a widely recognized open-source image analysis software package that enables researchers worldwide to extract biologically meaningful data from hundreds of thousands of plant phenotyping images.
Ananth Kalyanaraman, PhD
Professor, Boeing Chair of Computer Science
Ananth Kalyanaraman is the Director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Boeing Chair of Computer Science at Washington State University. He serves as the lead PI and Director of the NSF-USDA NIFA AgAID AI Institute. Additionally, he holds a joint appointment at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). He serves as affiliate faculty for the Molecular Plant Sciences Graduate Program and the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University, following his B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology. His research bridges the fields of parallel computing, graph analytics, and computational biology, with an emphasis on integrating data science, AI, and machine learning into practical, real-world applications. His work is centered on the development of scalable algorithms and software designed to analyze massive datasets, particularly within the domains of agriculture, plant sciences, and the broader life sciences.
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