Current Research
Stalk lodging reduces agronomic yields 5-20% annually.
Stalk lodging - the permanent displacement of plants from their vertical orientation - reduces agronomic yields 5-20% annually. Improving stalk lodging by a mere 1% in corn alone would lead to a yearly food security impact of 20 billion pounds of food and a yearly economic impact of ~$2 billion. The complex multi-scale nature of stalk lodging unfortunately confounds selective breeding studies aimed at reducing stalk lodging. Thus, advanced computational engineering tools must be integrated into biological models to elucidate the link between breeding traits and stalk lodging.
Computational tools are the way forward.
Computational engineering tools have been crucial in the advancement of human biomechanics, but such integration has unfortunately not yet occurred to the same extent in plant biomechanics. The cost-effectiveness and sample sizes enabled through plant research provides unique advantages over human specimens for the development of advanced computational technologies. I hypothesize that merging biological and genetic models with multi-scale biomechanical engineering simulations will generate much- needed understanding in the field of plant biomechanics, while simultaneously allowing researchers to develop and train models that can be leveraged in future human biomechanics research.