UT Tyler Receives Grant to Help Farmers Investigate Plant Health

Shawana Tabassum, PhD

The University of Texas at Tyler received a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative to help farmers investigate plant health. Dr. Shawana Tabassum, the UT Tyler Mary John and Ralph Spence Professor of Electrical Engineering, serves as a principal investigator on the two-year project.

Tabassum and her team of UT Tyler graduate students and postdoctoral research fellows will develop novel, field-deployable sensors for detecting and measuring volatile organic compounds and nitrogen ions in plants and soil. This research will lay the groundwork for measuring the correlation between volatile organic compounds emitted in the field and nitrogen deficiency in plants,” said Tabassum. “The technology resulting from this project will help farmers detect nitrogen stress early in major cash crops, including cotton.”