Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

News & Updates

From the Chair

Happy New Year! This first e-newsletter of 2023 deviates a bit from our normal format, because we are very happy to be focusing on six new BAE faculty members who have joined us in the past year (three starting Jan 1, 2023). It would be difficult to overstate how excited we are about these new colleagues and the impact they will be making on every aspect of our mission. Please take a moment to click through the stories below to read about the important work that these scholars are pursuing. Their expertise and program priorities encompass data/digital/sensing systems and decision support solutions applied to food safety, value-added supply chains, precision agriculture, and climate-resilient food and ag systems.

These additions to our BAE faculty were made possible by investments and institutional cooperation amongst the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, MSU AgBioResearch, MSU Extension, the College of Engineering, and the MSU Axia Institute. These partnerships and collaborative investments are elevating BAE to new levels of opportunity for programmatic leadership, and I am incredibly grateful for the support of all these entities and their leaders.

Our outstanding new faculty members are already adding value to our scholarly portfolio and contributing to our shared mission to improve quality of life. It is an exciting time for BAE!

Please feel free to drop me a note anytime if you want to discuss ideas or opportunities for collaborations or partnerships.

Go Green!

Bradley Marks, Ph.D., P.E.

Professor and Department Chair

MSU Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering

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Bahar Aliakbarian

Bahar Aliakbarian, Ph.D., joined Michigan State University (MSU) in 2017 at the Axia Institute to work on supply chain management. Her home department became Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) in March 2022. Aliakbarian’s expertise in her field is recognized around the world. She was also a guest instructor for a Ph.D. course at the University of Genoa in 2022, Smart Supply Chain and Application of Sensor-Based Technologies.

Yuzhen Lu

Yuzhun Lu, Ph.D., joined Michigan State University’s (MSU) Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) Department as an assistant professor in January 2023. His research focuses on developing and deploying sensing and automation/robotics technologies for smart agriculture and food systems. He has expertise in optical instrumentation, machine/computer vision, image analysis, and applied machine learning. Before joining MSU in January of 2023, Dr. Lu was a Postdoc research scholar with USDA-ARS and North Carolina State University and an Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University.

Carlos Marino

Carlos Marino, Ph.D., is changing traceability in supply chains with open-source technology. Marino joined Michigan State University (MSU) in January 2022 as an assistant professor in Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering (BAE). He is the Axia Institute’s research leader in Value Chain Digitization. He is responsible for developing Axia’s digital value chain research portfolio and working directly with forms across the industry to help reimagine their digital supply chains.

Daniel Morris

Daniel Morris, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Department (BAE) with a joint appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE). Morris’s lab, the 3D Vision Lab, has been exploring using Smart Agriculture to improve the quality of life across agriculture. Staffing has proved to be challenging for many producers in the agricultural industry, and turnover is high. Morris’s vision is to use automated monitoring of individual animals to guide animal-specific care.

Daniel Uyeh

Daniel Uyeh, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) and wants to continue to develop smart solutions to combat challenges from climate change. Uyeh joined Michigan State University (MSU)’s BAE Department in January 2023. Farmers are faced with the impacts of climate change. They used to depend on historical knowledge to make farm decisions, but climate change is forcing them to adapt more quickly to changes.

Jiyoon Yi

Jiyoon Yi, Ph.D., joined Michigan State University (MSU)’s Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) as an assistant professor in January 2023. Yi’s research focuses on novel techniques to advance food safety and security by combining physics-based and data-driven modeling with experimental methods. Her research primarily aims to automate and accelerate food process control using data and increasing resource efficiency.

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