Source: NCSU COLLEGE OF AG & LIFE SCIENCES, 1/7/22

Research assistant professor Daniela Jones discovered her spark for solving problems as an industrial engineering student at Mississippi State University. She’s brought that same energy to NC State and the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering. Jones holds a joint-faculty appointment with the Idaho National Laboratory and also serves as the director of the Agricultural Data Science Certificate at NC State. A native of Peru, Jones is passionate about improving the diverse workforce and talent within the fields of biological and agricultural engineering and renewable energy.

What brought you to NC State?
After completing my Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, I moved to North Carolina for family reasons. I enjoyed the challenge of working on renewable energy solutions and was beginning to understand the synergies between the environment and agriculture and how humans use natural resources. Before starting my position at NC State, I worked as a postdoc at Duke University. While there, I was part of a project to help students from historically underrepresented groups succeed in the biosciences. I realized that becoming a professor was my path to creating opportunities for students of other backgrounds in the field of renewable energy. Now I’m at NC State with a joint appointment with the national lab. 

Can you tell us about some of your research projects?
I’ve been getting myself involved in projects that do not necessarily align with renewable energy, but have helped me to better understand agriculture and food production. During a talk in October, I shared some of my work including an N.C. PSI funded project involving sweetpotato analysis. Sweetpotatoes have different shapes and sizes. When we go to the market, we usually look at sweetpotatoes and decide which one, aesthetically, catches our eye. Essentially the store has already put out the most homogeneous potatoes to make a consumer’s choice easier and faster. But when you’re harvesting, you get all different sizes and shapes and the manufacturing plants use scanners to take pictures of all the potatoes to sort them out. Based on the pictures, the potatoes are classified into different lanes for different purposes. 

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