Welcome to Alumni Conversations, which are a series of video interviews from 2020 with the global alumni community.
In this episode, you’ll meet Dharani Dhar Burra, PhD ’16 (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), MS ’11 (KAUST). Dhahrani recently joined the Open Farm and Field Data (ODX) program with Yara International, a global agricultural and environmental chemical company as a Principal Data Scientist, and is currently based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
When we spoke with Dharani in mid-2020 during lockdown, he was stuck in Jakarta, Indonesia, where he was working with the United Nations Global Pulse Program. We talked with Dharani about his career as a data scientist in the field of data and development within the agriculture and food systems sector; a career that has taken him from his home country India to Saudi Arabia, to Europe, the South Pacific, South East Asia, and now back to India.
As a scientist, Dharani uses his experience in data analytics, monitoring and evaluation to support technologies for data driven agriculture and farmer information systems, with the goal of leveraging novel big data sources and analytics for improving the sustainability of agriculture and food systems.
Enjoy our conversation with Dharani!