In this Award from the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows Program), Dr. Chinmay Soman from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will investigate how the soil microbiome is influenced by different kinds of agricultural practices. This award has support from: the Directorate for Biological Sciences, the Directorate for Geological Sciences, and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences.
The proposed work will combine modern genetic measurements of the soil microbiomes of agricultural land subject to a variety of agricultural practices.
The aim of studies like that proposed in this work is to help inform efforts to develop methods for sustainable agriculture.
Dr. Soman will be working with collaborators Prof. Angela Kent of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as Prof. Zhili He, Associate Director of the Institute for Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma. The work will also include the efforts of: Prof. Amy Ando with the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics; Prof. Richard Mulvaney with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences; and Prof. Luis Rodriguez with the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.
