Why taking your research to new global audiences matters: An Alliance scientist’s experience
Alliance scientist Michael Selvaraj’s participation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science demonstrated the importance of diversifying partnerships as traditional science-support networks reel under abrupt changes.
image: Alliance scientist Michael Selvaraj (second from left), with colleagues after their presentation at the AAAS meeting in Boston in February 2025. Texas A&M's Seth Murray, (middle), and Jennifer Clarke (right), are two of Selvaraj's growing team of collaborators.
Credit: Credit: courtesy of Michael Selvaraj/Alliance
In 2023, The New York Times wrote about how Michael Selvaraj used artificial intelligence to build an app that some 16,000 farmers worldwide now use to detect, identify and treat banana diseases. Around the same time, Selvaraj presented the app at Texas A&M University with the invitation of Seth Murray, a professor specializing in plant phenomics and corn breeding. The app’s success – and its increased visibility in the Global North – led to a further invitation for Selvaraj to speak at the prestigious annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held this year in Boston.
Selvaraj’s work - which focuses on detecting and describing how bananas, beans, cassava and rice respond to disease, drought and nutrient-depleted soils - may seem like a specialty niche. However, by bringing the work to a wide range of non-traditional audiences, Selvaraj, his lab, and his growing number of international colleagues show that increasing their work’s visibility is proving key to its success.
“We could keep to ourselves and just speak amongst ourselves about our work, but we need to get outside of our ‘comfort zones’ and tell other people about it,” said Selvaraj, who also met with new colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to start a new collaboration while in Boston. “The success of our science relies considerably on telling people why our work matters to the future of food as food production everywhere is dealing with unprecedented challenges such as climate change.”
“Our group working on plant phenomics includes statisticians, engineers, geneticists, experts on big data analysis and plant physiologists, among others, based in numerous research institutions both domestic and international,” said Dr. Jennifer Clarke, a faculty statistician at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a Director within the Agricultural Research Division at UNL’s Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources. “Collaboration across expertise and geographies is essential to make the advances we need if we’re going to make agriculture sustainable and global food systems function for everyone.”
Warm welcome
Speaking at the annual gathering of the world's leading scientists is a rare – if intimidating – honor. Often billed as the largest multidisciplinary science event of its kind, an AAAS invitation is more than a reaffirmation of the global relevance of a scientist’s research. Selvaraj returned to his Alliance lab in Colombia with new research ideas and methods, potential collaborations, funding opportunities and contacts for students in his lab to further their higher education abroad.
“It’s a totally different kind of meeting,” said Selvaraj, who previously only attended conferences closely linked to his research discipline. “You meet leading scientists from dozens of fields, learn new ways to interpret and communicate your data, and make contacts with leading research institutions.”
Given the global tumult in the science world over the future of traditional funding sources (the turmoil stole meeting headlines that otherwise would have focused on breakthrough research), adding unconventional names to your professional contact lists is worth the investment.
While not onstage or brainstorming new angles to tackle research questions with existing colleagues, Selvaraj took in a session in another groundbreaking field: human phenomics. Researchers presented work on predictive human phenomics : research that studies how environmental factors influence health.
“My team and I are predicting plant diseases; human phenomicists work on predicting diseases like cancer” said Selvaraj. “I learned how human phenotyping technologies can be applied to crop phenology and vice versa, and the people I met working on human phenomics are now looking at our work to see if they can adopt some of our innovations.”
What is plant phenomics?Traditional plant phenomics includes the study of observable traits like growth patterns, leaf size, flower color and fruit and seed production. Rapidly evolving technological advances today allow scientists to expand this research to data only captured by sensors and computer algorithms, like subtle differences in leaf color and growth rates. These traits, never before recognized or measured and that scientists still lack language for, are heritable and predictive, meaning these can permit researchers to learn how crops are expected to respond under different environmental stressors. Selvaraj and Alliance colleagues use phenotyping to understand how these traits respond across different varieties to biotic stressors (diseases and pest) and abiotic stressors such as drought, heat, flooding, and nutrient-depleted soils. Using drones and cameras, they collect vast data from thousands of crop varieties—many stored in the Alliance’s Future Seeds genebank in Colombia. This data is shared with researchers to identify genes linked to desirable traits, accelerating the breeding of crop varieties suited for today’s challenging climate. |
Plant phenomics: Unique innovative collaboration opportunities
Unlike some other research areas, “there are no ethical issues in growing large populations, stressing them or killing them to get new data, which is exactly what is needed to develop the tools of phenomic discovery. This will make a difference not only in food production, but also in creating methods that can be used to improve animal and human health,” said Selvaraj’s colleague, Seth Murray, a phenomics researcher and professor at Texas A&M.
The fields of genetics and statistics “basically grew out of crop sciences,” said Texas A&M’s Dr. Murray: “Phenomics appears to be following the same path.”
“Phenotyping and phenomics are the most exciting and energetic emerging fields that I have been a part of, in no small part because most practitioners come from many different backgrounds,” said Murray, who holds the Eugene Butler Endowed Chair at Texas A&M, last held by Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman Borlaug. “I think all of science has a lot to learn from what the plant research community is innovating here.”
Open Access
Scientists can emulate Selvaraj’s AAAS experience with no coveted speaking invitation required. While at AAAS, Selvaraj visited the dozens of booths representing research institutions, universities and government science organizations to pick up email addresses, phone numbers and research projects aligned with his work. “I spoke with people at many universities to learn which ones may have scholarships and fellowships for the students who work in my lab,” said Selvaraj.
What will the future hold? Much more in the way of international news coverage from the Selvaraj lab. While many Alliance scientists already pursue similar opportunities, they are encouraged to do more.
“Sharing our research with wider audiences opens the door to a lot of Alliance work, which is primarily focused on smallholder farming systems,” Selvaraj said. “Researchers in the U.S. focus on large farming systems. We’re now exchanging ideas on small-plot phenomics and large-plot phenomics to improve research approaches for both systems. There are no reasons why other research areas cannot have similar exchanges.”
“The AAAS meeting provided an excellent opportunity to further share the Alliance’s advances in research, innovation and policy to scale science-based solutions,” said Marcela Quintero, the Alliance’s Associate Director General. “I encourage our scientists to continue participating in this prestigious scientific forum and other multidisciplinary meetings to disseminate our remarkable scientific advances and to learn from experts in other research areas.”