Earlier this month, Case School of Engineering master’s student, Olatunde Akanbi, and postdoc, Erika Barcelos, brought home first and third place, respectively, from the Center for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER) Symposium's Poster Competition at Texas Tech University.

Akanbi and Barcelos are both involved with the CASFER at Case Western Reserve University, the National Science Foundation funded project working to enable resilient and sustainable food production by developing next generation technology for capturing, recycling and producing decarbonized nitrogen-based fertilizers. 

Barcelos works closely with Akanbi, the competition’s first place winner, focusing specifically on geospatial modeling. The two are developing predictive models that allow the tracking of nutrients in watersheds.

“I have been able to use satellite images to monitor the health of crops and vegetation classification on a daily basis across the United States, and also monitor nitrogen accumulation in the soil,” Akanbi said.

In addition to this work, Barcelos is dedicated to collaborating with CASFER’s partner institutions—Texas Tech University, Florida A&M University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The topic of her poster was “The development of a FAIRification framework for CASFER experimental datasets,” which focused on how this team that is dispersed across the country is able to share, store and gain access to critical data in the most efficient way. 

“Our group had first and third place in a symposium where over 80% of people come from different fields,” Barcelos said. “So it means a lot to us! It means that CASFER, as a whole, sees the importance of our team efforts in both the data management side and in the development of our predictive models.”