UF/IFAS agricultural and biological engineering professor and Florida Climate Institute director Senthold Asseng has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as part of the Section of Agriculture, Food, and Renewable Resources. Election as an AAAS Fellow is a prestigious honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals.
This year 443 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. This year’s AAAS Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on 29 November 2019.
Senthold Asseng
Asseng works in the field of climate impact modeling. He and his team work with climate scientists to translate climate scenario data into an impact by running data through crop simulation models, which simulate how crops grow as it responds to temperature, light, water sources. This climate information is used as drivers of the models.
Crop simulations allow experiments to be run on a computer rather than in a field, taking what would be months of field research and providing reliable results in seconds. These simulations can be run with a variety of crop treatments and crop locations.
Climate impact modeling is also looking to the future to find out more about what happens as temperatures raise or when C02 levels increase. Other research areas that benefit from climate impact modeling include food security, production quantity and quality, nutrition content in foods, water source effects, pests and diseases, speed of change impacts, and a variety of other research areas that affect agricultural production.
For greater collaboration in this field, the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Program (AgMIP) was created to help further connect the network of climate scientists, crop modelers, and other agricultural scientists from around the world. With over 1,000 members, this is one of the largest research networks with a focus on agriculture. In addition to being a member of AgMIP, Asseng serves on its global leadership panel.
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