News before 2023: Dec 2022: The 2022 American Geophysical Union Annual Meeting features Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and our SMARTFARM projects.NCSA further promoted our recent work at ASC for climate change studies. Dec 2022: Our cover crop work to map out its availability at every field for the past 22 years, we see a slow increase of cover crop adoption in the Midwest (covered by Washington Post), and another relevant work demonstrates how this field-level cover crop data contributed to the understanding of the potential yield loss. Nov 2022: I am extremely excited to see our "system-of-systems" solution for carbon accounting has been acknowledged as the FoodShot Global Groundbreaker Prize, one of the three awardees given annually and globally. Thanks FoodShot Global and Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) for this major award! Nov 2022: I am excited to be one of the nine Illinois scholars in 2022 Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list. Oct 2022: National Center for Supercomputing Application (NCSA) at UIUC features our group's work on using supercomputing for agroecosystem sensing and modeling. Aug 2022: Thanks to Illinois Innovation Network and State of Illinois for the recognition of being one of the five receipts for the 2022 IIN Innovator of the Year Awards. Aug 2022: Associated Press's coverage of the recent Congress bill on the climate deal quotes my comments on farmers' role here: "Not only are they [farmers] doing this to be part of the solution to help the climate, they are doing this to help their land." Jun 2022: Our lab's new work on modeling nitrogen fertilizer management using the ecosys model for the US Midwest regions provides the scientific foundation to develop decision-making tools for farmers. Jun 2022: PhD student Qu got the NASA FINNEST graduate fellowship - the most distinguished graduate student fellowship offered by NASA, with the proposed work on mapping cover crop for the whole US cropland. May 2022: Our new SMARTFARM work, led by Prof. Zhenong Jin from University of Minnesota, hybrids AI with process-based modeling to propose the first-of-its-kind modeling framework called "Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning (KGML)" for modeling agroecosystem GHG. Apr 2022: Our recent ARPA-E SMARTFARM paper in Geodema: how to develop an estimation strategy that maximizes accuracy while minimizing the number of soil cores sampled. Mar 2022: Our team's new work in RSE on using hyperspectral sensing and AI to estimate soil carbon in the lab and on assessing its potential to apply in the real world by various satellite sensors. Jan 2022: Our new airborne hyperspectral work demonstrates the advanced ability to accurately derive canopy nitrogen status and photosynthetic capacity close to the ground truth quality, but at a much lower cost. Dec 2021: I am honored to be a speaker at C3 Digital Transformation Institute. Whole talk online.  Oct 2021: We joined a multi-institute USDA $10M project led by Prof. Madhu Khanna in developing agrivoltaics in the broad agricultural landscape. Sep 2021: White House Briefing highlights three major projects of my group at the national level, in the space of carbon and climate, including our new DOE BETO project and two ARPA-E SMARTFARM projects. Sep 2021: Our new study integrates field data and advanced mathematical modeling to understand the relationship between cover crop growth and summer cash crop yield.  Sep 2021: SMARTFARM Projects are featured in the Planet Lab's blog.  Sep 2021: We developed a new framework to identify 30m-resolution marginal land for the U.S., by processing 72 billion pixels of satellite data at the Blue Waters Supercomputer.  Aug 2021: "New Modeling Solution Sets Bar for Quantifying Carbon Budget and Credit." - Our new paper from ARPA-E SMARTFARM project. Aug 2021: Our collaborative study with University of Minnesota's Zhenong Jin's team led to improved estimation of N2O emission for the U.S. Corn Belt! Jul 2021: PBS podcast features our work of studying agricultural drought. Jul 2021: Thanks Larta Institute to nominate me as a finalist of Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award. Jun 2021: Five SPIN undergraduate interns from our group are featured by NCSA and two of them got the distinguished Fiddle Innovation Award. Jun 2021: I am humbled and honored to be named as a Blavatnik National Award of Young Scientist Finalist! Thanks to all my students, co-workers, mentors and my family! Jun 2021: Our group wins an AI for Energy and Climate Security Award from the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, focusing on quantifying farmland carbon credit using AI tech. May 2021: Our group's new review article sheds light on how to improve precision crop irrigation.  Feb 2021: Our lab developed a new dataset of photosynthesis at the daily and field scale from 2000-present for the continental US. Nov 2020: Our work on Reliable and Novel Tools for Long-Term Crop Predictions at the Blue Waters Supercomputer wins us the HPC Innovation Excellence Award by Hyperion Research. Nov 2020: FORBES covered our lab's recent work about better assessments of drought for the U.S. Corn Belt. Nov 2020: We are integrating airborne data with satellite data to bridge scales from individual plants, to a field, and ultimately to continental applications. Sep 2020: Recent two papers from my group provide rationales and justification of how we should redefine drought in the US Corn Belt and beyond. Sep 2020: We are leading a new project with $4.5 million from ARPA-E to develop commercial carbon credit tools for farmland.  Jun 2020: Ph.D. student Genghong Wu from our lab got award from NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology. May 2020: Our "Nature Plants" review paper provides visionary roadmaps of how to develop next-generation crop models for advancing crop breeding, precision agriculture, and assessing climate change adaptations. Apr 2020: Our group's recent work in Global Change Biology, of quantifying the irrigation cooling benefits of improving crop yield for the U.S. Midwest irrigated maize. Mar 2020: Our team developed a new algorithm framework to produce real-time field-scale evapotranspiration (ET, or crop water uses) for everywhere in the US. Going to cover everywhere in the planet. Mar 2020: Our lab's Ph.D. student Hyungsuk Kimm led a new work to enable the monitoring of "Corn productivity in real time: Satellites, field cameras, and farmers team up". Jan 2020: We lead a team of UIUC scientists to measure corn-soybean carbon emission "gold standard data" through DOE ARPA-e program. Jan 2020: Our team used Nanosatellites to improve detection of early-season corn nitrogen stress. Jun 2019: Our lab officially joins NASA Harvest Program, and a new project is developed to provide Illinois farmers actional guidance on field-level management by using NASA satellite data and process-based modeling. Jun 2019: Thanks for the coverage by SC19 (Supercomputing Conference 2019) on our work and vision: "Food Production & HPC: Understanding Plant Growth From Above and Below". Jun 2019: Our team, with Prof. Evan DeLucia, conducted a study on understanding increased crop water needs and potential irrigation expansion in the US Midwest in the future. Jun 2019: Two recent collaborative works on hyperspectral phenotyping, with Prof. Carl Bernacchi, have been published with press releases. May 2019: Press release on our recent AFM work about Australia wheat yield prediction. Apr 2019: Press release on our recent GCB work about the excessive rainfall impacts on US maize production. Apr 2019: Prof. Peng and my lab are awarded Amazon "Earth on AWS" Research Award.  Mar 2019: Our T-FACE project has been chosen to represent U. of I. in the SoAR Foundation's report of Retaking the Field: Science Breakthroughs for Thriving Farms and a Healthier Nation. Feb 2019: NSF CAREER Award (UIUC ACES, UIUC NCSA).  Jan 2019: NCSA "Can you imagine" interview. Dec 2018: AGU Global Environmental Change Early Career Award (UIUC ACES, UIUC NCSA). Nov 2018: Highlighted in the NCSA's exhibits in SC18. Sep 2018: Our algorithm predicts US end-of-season corn yield better than the USDA forecasts. Aug 2018: R&D Magazine covers a story of our recent work in satellite crop applications.