Associate Professor, Department of Crop and Soil Sciences Ethan Pickering is an Associate Professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences and leads the Computational Agriculture Lab at the intersection of AI and plant biology. His group develops purpose-built AI for biological discovery and crop design—spanning foundation models (including DNA LLMs), biology-informed neural networks, and agentic AI—along with tailored objectives and active learning strategies (e.g., rare-event). The lab’s mission is to accelerate plant gene editing, phenomics, and predictive breeding to enable resilient crops for rapidly changing global conditions. Education: Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Caltech (2021) M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Caltech (2018) B.S., Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Case Western Reserve University (2015)
