The U. of I. and Dow AgroSciences LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company, announced the Sept. 28 grand opening of the Dow AgroSciences Innovation Center in the Research Park on the Urbana campus.
This facility brings together resources from key fields for the company’s research and development efforts – statistics, mathematics, computer science and engineering – to catalyze innovation through analytics.
Projects at the facility focus on exploration and implementation of analytics technologies applied to agricultural challenges. The facility allows students, most of them at the graduate level, to work year round on various projects related to development of advanced computational tools and analysis of chemical and biological datasets.
“The Dow AgroSciences Innovation Center at the University of Illinois brings us directly into the center of one of the nation’s top computational sciences campuses,” said Daniel R. Kittle, the vice president of Dow AgroSciences Research and Development. “The university has excellent talent that will enable us to advance our global agricultural research efforts.”
The facility builds upon the momentum already established by The Dow Chemical Company Innovation Center, which opened in 2013 and focuses on information technology applied to research and development. The two innovation centers are co-located and share resources. The new facility expands upon the longstanding research and development relationship between the U. of I. and Dow AgroSciences.
“The intersection of agriculture with data analysis continues to advance in intensity and complexity,” said Interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson. “To work on such problems in real-world scenarios is an invaluable opportunity for our students, augmenting their education significantly and giving them an advantage as they go into the workplace. Agriculture is becoming a focal point for operations in the Research Park, and Dow AgroSciences is a key component of that peer group.”
