Arti Singh, associate professor in agronomy, is the recipient of the 2025 Rossmann Manatt Faculty Development Award from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University. She is a pioneer in linking machine learning, artificial intelligence and plant phenotyping. She leads a vibrant and innovative team of students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers from across the university that are leveraging these linkages for the betterment of agriculture and humanity.
Singh has a vision for machine learning tools and applications in plant stress phenotyping. She has pursued this vision by forming an interdisciplinary team and engaging engineers, statisticians and computer scientists in her research projects. One example is the development of InsectNet to help farmers around the world. The application – which is backed by a dataset of 12 million insect images – provides identification and predictions for more than 2,500 insect species at more than 96% accuracy. This high impact app was immediately relevant for farmers, agronomists and other stakeholders.
To ensure that Iowa State’s students are AI-literate, Singh is working on fixing gaps in education specifically at the undergraduate level. She led the agronomy department’s participation in the data science minor. A colleague stated, “Dr. Singh is deeply vested in training the next generation of AI-literate plant scientists who can continue to transform agriculture.”
Singh is internationally recognized for her work exploring AI’s potential for agriculture, and she is encouraging students to take leadership in AI technologies for the future. She has organized a group of students as Workforce in Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence to encourage more involvement in AI and recognize its potential to solve various agriculture-related problems. The group runs workshops, field tours and demonstrations catered to students at the K-12, undergraduate and graduate level.
Singh has accomplished all the above while leading a plant-based protein crop breeding program in mung bean, field peas and black gram. These projects serve the growing industry of plant-based protein crops and are uniquely positioned to help Midwestern farmers leverage high yield, high protein mung bean varieties to diversify their land management and improve on-farm income. Also, these crops are essential protein sources for some of the most at-risk humans worldwide.
The Rossmann Manatt Faculty Development Award is designed to recognize a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences or College of Health and Human Sciences tenured faculty member who has demonstrated a truly exceptional level of creativity and productivity in scholarship, teaching and service and who shows great promise of continuing such achievement. The award comes with a stipend intended to facilitate faculty development activities. Singh plans to use the stipend to support the Workforce in Agriculture and AI initiative by exposing youth to AI applications and STEM opportunities in agriculture. The activities will focus on agriculture, robotics, drones, AI and leadership development.