Profs present award-winning research at Syngenta

Within Syngenta’s innovation team, the work Ling and Durai did is aligned with some of the things Syngenta is doing.

—Dorothy Kittner, assistant dean and director of corporate relations

Two faculty members presented Olin Award-winning research recently to Minneapolis-based alumni and executives from Syngenta, the agriculture technology company that provided the data underpinning the two professors’ research.

Meanwhile, a feature story the two professors worked on with HEC-TV in St. Louis has aired on local television. See the embedded version below.

Durai Sundaramoorthi and Lingxiu Dong traveled to Syngenta’s US operations facility in St. Louis Park, Minnesota on Aug. 16-17. Weeks in the making, the visit put the two researchers in front of Jeff Rowe, Syngenta’s president of global seeds and North America and China, as well as other executives and alumni.

Sundaramoorthi, senior lecturer in management, and Dong won the Olin Award in February for research that developed a framework for optimizing which seed varieties would generate the highest crop yields given specific geography and anticipated weather conditions. The research also produced a simulation application, allowing farmers to run hundreds of seed varieties through multiple growth conditions.

The two researchers used a giant data set from Syngenta with crop, seed, yield, weather, and soil data spanning 2008 to 2014.

“The audience was very engaged, asked many good questions following the presentation, and was excited about the potential of analytics in various decision-making in the agriculture context,” said Dong, professor of operations and manufacturing management, following the visit. “We had great conversations with attendees and were very much encouraged by the enthusiasm and positive responses to our research.”

The research pair was joined on the trip by former Dean Robert Virgil; Nancy Barter, senior director of development; and Dorothy Kittner, assistant dean and director of corporate relations, who worked on many of the logistics for the visit.

“Within Syngenta’s innovation team, the work Ling and Durai did is aligned with some of the things Syngenta is doing,” Kittner said. While the Olin research was aimed primarily at farmers, “the future is how would you make it applicable for Syngenta to help their customers.”

Syngenta, along with Dong and Sundarmoorthi, expressed interest in continuing the research collaboration. Carl Casale, MBA ’92, and a member of Syngenta’s board of directors, arranged the meeting and presentation.

“We are grateful for Carl Casale for initiating and supporting the visit to Syngenta, for Syngenta for hosting the event,” Dong said. “The trip was a great experience for us.”