Debjani Sihi

Bio

Debjani Sihi joined the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences AI cluster in Fall 2024. She is affiliated with the departments of Plant and Microbial Biology and Crop and Soil Sciences. Before joining NC State, she was a faculty member at Emory University. Her doctoral research was completed at the University of Florida, and she held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences (Appalachian Laboratory) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Her research program focuses on the plant-soil-microbe-atmosphere continuum. Sihi is a biogeochemist by training, and her work involves integrating field and laboratory data with machine learning (AI) and process-based (mechanistic) models. Her specialization lies in soil (and ecosystem) carbon (and nutrient) cycle processes and greenhouse gas emissions from managed agricultural and natural forest, wetland and grassland ecosystems.

As part of the N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative, she is interested in building an interdisciplinary program that leverages cutting-edge technologies (including sensors, imaging and molecular technologies) to address grand challenges of our era (climate change, food security, and environmental sustainability) using multi-scale modeling and big data analytics approaches. Research projects in the Sihi Lab are funded by federal agencies (including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy) and industry partners (Valent Biosciences).