Daniela Jones

Dani Jones is director of the N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative’s Education and Workforce Development Platform and esearch Assistant Professor in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering Department at North Carolina State University. She also holds a joint-faculty appointment with Idaho National Laboratory.

At NC State, Jones is also the Data Science Academy director of agricultural analytics; director of the Agricultural Data Science Certificate; Office of Research and Innovation faculty fellow; graduate faculty of the Operations Research Program; faculty fellow of the Center of Geospatial Analytics; faculty affiliate of the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center; and faculty affiliate of the Agricultural Biotechnology in Our Evolving Food, Energy, and Water Systems NSF Research Traineeship Program.

She earned her Ph.D. in biological and agricultural engineering with a concentration on energy systems from Texas A&M University, where she was an Alfred P. Sloan Scholar and received a certificate in business management. She received her master’s and bachelor of science degrees in industrial engineering, with an emphasis in operations research, and a minor in mathematics from Mississippi State University. She interned at Idaho National Laboratory and collaborated with multidisciplinary teams at Oak Ridge National Laboratory through her work on biofuels and renewable energy.

Earlier, she was a postdoctoral associate at Duke University, where she performed quantitative and qualitative research on student interventions and supported programming of educational, career development workshops and community development events for underrepresented undergraduate and graduate students in the biosciences.