Penn Engineering’s NSF-backed Engineering Research Center for precision agriculture (the IoT4Ag) was formally launched in September of 2020 and is being actively supported by PCI’s Corporate Outreach team through its spearheading of the Innovation Ecosystem function for the multi-institutional alliance.
In the Center’s first year, the team successfully recruited and signed up eighteen private sector members who share the Center’s vision of achieving sustainable, environmentally-safe and energy-conscious food security through innovative technology. – including start-ups, investment firms, mature companies, and non-profits – for the Center’s industrial participant advisory board. Board members provide valuable input and collaborate in commercializing developed IP.
About the NSF’s Engineering Research Centers
The U.S. National Science Foundation is investing $104 million in four new engineering research centers over the next five years. Each center will have a specific research focus. Penn is one of the Principal Investigator, under the direction of Dr. Cherie Kagan, of IoTAg.
This IoTAg Center seeks to ensure food, energy and water security with new systems to increase crop production while minimizing energy and water use and environmental impacts of agricultural practices. To accomplish this task, center researchers will focus on the development of low-cost sensor technologies to measure these variables at relevant spatial and temporal scales. The other partner universities, include: Purdue University, University of California, Merced, and the University of Florida.
The other centers include: