UT Tyler Professor Receives Grant to Develop Fitness Tracker for Plants
April 5, 2022
UT Tyler Professor Receives Grant to Develop Fitness Tracker for Plants
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Follow @UTTyler TweetApril 5, 2022
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Shawana Tabassum, PhD, assistant professor of electrical engineering at The University of Texas at Tyler, has received a $200,000 National Science Foundation Research Initiative Award to design wearable sensors to aid in the prevention of crop failures.
“Crop-FIT: Technology to Support Integrated Wearable Fitness Trackers for Plants” will provide real-time quantitative indicators of plant health for early identification of any potential stressors that may adversely affect growth.
“The outcomes from this project will enable growers to mitigate crop productivity losses due to environmental stressors by implementing site-specific interventions,” said Tabassum. “In addition, data collected during the project will be stored in a database to help researchers select genotypes for the development of crop strains that have greater stress tolerance.”
Tabassum studies flexible and soft sensors, micro/nano-optics, microfluidic devices, micro- and nano-electro mechanical systems (M/NEMS) and their applications in sustainable agriculture and environment, plant sciences and biomedicine.
Crop-FIT will provide the foundation for a long-term research program to support the development of sensors, models and management decisions needed to promote precision farming, Tabassum added.
The research is conducted in collaboration with Texas A&M University and offers opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students at UT Tyler to participate in valuable research.
Tabassum joined the UT Tyler engineering faculty in 2020. She holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Iowa State University and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
With a mission to improve educational and healthcare outcomes for East Texas and beyond, UT Tyler offers more than 80 undergraduate and graduate programs to 10,000 students. UT Tyler recently merged with The University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler (now known as UT Tyler Health Science Center). Through its alignment with UT Tyler Health Science Center (HSC) and UT Health East Texas, UT Tyler has unified these entities to serve Texas with quality education, cutting-edge research and excellent patient care. Classified by Carnegie as a doctoral research institution and by U.S. News & World Report as a national university, UT Tyler has campuses in Tyler, Longview, Palestine and Houston.