Dr. Ankita Raturi shares her journey from coding and computer science to agricultural engineering. She explores what the role of technology can and should be in the field, the importance of finding balance and how she navigates the many demands of life as “an octopus on roller skates”.  

Read the episode transcript.

Meet the guest

Dr. Ankita Raturi is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Purdue University, where she leads the Agricultural Informatics Lab focused on human-centered design, information modeling, and software engineering for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems. Her goal is to design algorithms, methods, and tools that empower decision makers – from farmers and consumers, to researchers and policy makers – to create sustainable food systems. Prior to joining Purdue in 2019, Ankita worked on cover crop decision support tools and the development of an information ecology for sustainable agriculture with the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Lab at USDA ARS and the Center for Environmental Farming Systems at NC State. She continues to work in the cover crop domain to shape the cover crop user experiences, improve data and tool interoperability, and establish data management best practices. Ankita received her PhD in Software Engineering from the Department of Informatics at the University of California - Irvine, where she took a human-centered approach to the design of a Modeling Sustainable Systems (MoSS) framework for representing complex, adaptive, agricultural systems. Ankita has a Masters in Information and Computer Science, also from UC Irvine, and a B.S. in Computer Science and Information Systems from The University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji.