Kaiyu Guan | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Kaiyu Guan
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

I am a Levenick Endowed Professor in agroecosystem sensing and modeling at UIUC, a Blue-Waters Professor in Supercomputing at UIUC-NCSA, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois System, the Founding Director of Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) at UIUC, and also the Chief Scientist of the NASA Acres Consortium - representing NASA's flagship program in advancing US agriculture research. My major affiliations at UIUC are with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES), Siebel School of Computing and Data Sciences (CS), College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). My research group uses advanced process models, satellite sensing technology, fieldwork, and artificial intelligence to address how climate and human practices affect crop productivity, water resource, ecosystem functioning, and environmental sustainability. We have keen interests in applying our knowledge and skills in solving real-life problems, such as large-scale crop monitoring and forecasting, quantification of greenhouse gas emission, agricultural policy design, water management and sustainability, and global food security. My name ("Kaiyu" - "开宇") was given by my grandpa, and it carries his sincere hope that I could be an astronaut to explore and discover the universe.

Mission Statement: We aim to bring domain knowledge (i.e. Earth system science, hydrology, plant physiology, biogeochemistry, ecology, agricultural science), satellite data, supercomputing, and machine learning together to revolutionize the agricultural research, such that we can observe every crop field in real-time, monitor crop growth condition, water demands, and nutrient needs, forecast crop yield, risks and environmental impacts (e.g. greenhouse gas emission, soil carbon change), and provide farmers our solutions to best manage their fields as well as policy-makers improved agricultural policy design, across the U.S. and Worldwide. We strive to achieve co-sustainability of environment quality and food security.

Other Links: LinkedIn

For Prospective Students: I recruit PhDs and Masters students from the following programs@UIUC:
PhDs: NRES, PEEC, Informatics
Masters&PhDs: Computer Science

Recruitment: We are recruiting Research Scientists, Postdocs, & PhD Students on Ecosystem Modeling and Remote Sensing. See details here.

Recent News: (news before 2023 can be found here)
Apr 2025: I am honored to receive the 2025 agInnovation Research Innovation Award of Excellence.
Feb 2025: Great honor to become the Levenick Endowed Professor. Thanks to the campus's support and generous gift from Nancy and Stu Levenick!
Jan 2025: Our work led by Eric Potash demonstrated that rigorous large-scale carbon crediting projects can be cost-effective to develop using a measure-and-remeasure approach.
Nov 2024: I gave the American Society of Agronomy Plenary E.T. and Vam York Distinguished Lectureship.
Sep 2024: Thanks Blavatnik Family Foundation for the recognition again as a finalist of the Blavatnik National Award for Young Scientist.
Aug 2024: FFAR featured our work as Breakthrough: our work in knowledge-guided machine learning using AI and supercomputers to quantify greenhouse gas emissions for millions of fields.
Jun 2024: Our recent work reveals stable soil moisture variability within fields and opens the door for satellite remote sensing for future measurements.
May 2024: I am glad to get the Distinguished Promotion Award to the full professor at UIUC.
Apr 2024: We hosted NASA Earth Science leaders to visit Illinois and discuss NASA Acres and how to further engage farmers for our research.
Mar 2024: ASC scientists released long-term data of ground solar-induced fluorescence to improve understanding of canopy-level photosynthesis.
Feb 2024: ASC Announces N2Onet to Track Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Agricultural Systems.
Jan 2024: USDA selects our team to study spring dust storms over rural Midwest.
Nov 2023: Excited to join the Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list again.
Oct 2023: I am extremely honored to receive the AGU James Macelwane Medal and become an AGU fellow. This is a shared honor to our whole team!
Oct 2023: Our collaborative work with Prof. Lisa Ainsworth demonstrated that solar-induced fluorescence can detect soybean ozone stress, paving a way of a potential scalable use of this signal for phenotyping and crop stress detection.
Sep 2023: Our “System-of-Systems” solution to quantify field-level agricultural carbon outcomes is published in Earth-Science Reviews! We see this is a major breakthrough to enable us to accurately quantify climate-smart agricultural benefits from a field to the whole nation, serving farmers, industry, and policymakers.
Aug 2023: Our recent work in Geodema demonstrates our proposed "doubly balanced sampling" is a much more efficient and robust way to sample and quantify field-level soil organic carbon (SOC).
Jun 2023: It is my great honor to have been awarded as a “University Scholar” of the University of Illinois System - it is among the highest honors of U of I, and I am thrilled and grateful!
May 2023: I put together an opinion piece with Syngenta Chief Soil Scientist Matt Wallenstein at Agri-Pulse on the recent Illinois dust storm as a wake-up call to society and government to take actions to fund sustainable farming.
May 2023: Our new GCB work of quantifying cover crop impacts on soil carbon benefits reveals critical insights on cover crop benefits and how to optimally manage the trade-offs of cover crop and corn/soy yield.
Feb 2023: The global mainstream media in Agtech reported our work from the lab to the real-world impact, featuring the recent FoodShot Global GroundBreaker Prize.
Jan 2023: I am so proud to be a part of this documentary the Illinois Farm Bureau (IFB) produced about our home state's environmental work, entitled “Sustaining Our Future: A Farm Family Story”. We are proud to be part of this journey to work with the families and individuals to help their bottom line while also advancing agricultural sustainability on our land.
Jan 2023: Our new work in RSE has shown a breakthrough in the accuracy and scalability in using airborne hyperspectral to map out tillage residue and tillage practice at large scale.
Jan 2023: Our new work clarified the correct understanding of what is “soil carbon credit”, and also comprehensively assessed the uncertainty leading to the calculation of soil carbon credits. Exciting finding from our work: the current public soil data in the US (e.g. SSURGO) can be used to quantify soil carbon credit with limited uncertainty.

Short Bio: Before I joined UIUC, I was a post-doctoral scholar working with Prof. David Lobell in the Center on Food Security and the Environment and Department of Environmental Earth System Science, Stanford University. My postdoc research was to study climate change impacts and adaptations on crop production and food security in West African and US. Specifically, I used empirical and process-based approaches to model drought and heat stress effects on staple crop production and assess possible adaptation pathways. I also worked with Dr. Joe Berry on using satellite-based photosynthesis measurements (sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence) to quantify crop productivity. I briefly worked in the Climate Corporation to help their nitrogen modeling development between my Stanford and UIUC time.

Our group's research portfolio includes the following three major categories with six specific areas (see below). Our group develops holistic solutions from sensing and monitoring, to modeling and quantification, for agricultural management practices, crop/feedstock carbon and GHG, and environmental conditions. The unique strength and innovation of our research group is the systematic thinking to integrate sensing (from satellite, airborne and ground sensing) with process models and AI to infer holistic agroecosystem dynamics, from aboveground to belowground conditions, covering the coupled water, carbon, nitrogen and energy cycles.