Congratulations to Shuaiqi Wu for passing his Qualifying Exam

We are excited to share the news that our research group PhD student Shuaiqi Wu successfully passed his Qualifying Examination on Thursday September 15.

Shuaiqi successfully presented his prospectus on the "Climate change impacts on key crops in California and potential adaptation pathways". He provided an overview of the role of Agriculture in California, the historical and projected influence of climate change, and the major studies to date that have focused on major perennial crops, like almonds, and specialty annual crops, like tomatoes. He then discussed the role of processed-based crop models and data-driven statistical models and the potential to integrate both modeling frameworks for more reliable assessments of the impact of climate change on crop productivity and the identification of potential adaptation pathways. Shuaiqi then presented his preliminary work developing a statistical crop model for almonds in California, describing his modeling approach, an evaluation of his model and results from a large ensemble of simulations of county-level almond yield in California under different climate change scenarios. He then described his plans to integrate Machine Learning methods, high-resolution remote sensing data and a process-based crop model into a high-resolution gridded crop modeling framework focusing on specialty annual crops in California. He further explained how he plans on running this new modeling framework under a large range of climate and land management scenarios.

Shuaiqi then fielded a number of questions about his understanding of possible challenges with his plan relating to data, representation of key phenological processes and climate projections. He also answer several questions relating to crop modeling, biometeorology, remote sensing and climate science. His committee was generally impressed and passed him. So congratulations to Shuaiqi who is know officially a PhD candidate!