About

Dr. Ethan Pickering

Associate Professor, Crop and Soil Sciences, University of Georgia; PI of the Computational Agriculture Lab

  • (2026- ) Associate Professor, Crop and Soil Sciences, University of Georgia; Principal Investigator, Computational Agriculture Lab (Adjunct Professor, 2024-2025)
  • (2022-2025) Bayer Crop Science, Head of Data Science and AI Research (2024-2025) and AI Genomics Modeling Team Lead (2022-2024)
  • (2023) Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, MIT
  • (2021-2022) Postdoctoral Scholar in Mechanical Engineering, MIT (with Professor Themis Sapsis)
  • (2016-2021) Ph.D. (2021) and M.S. (2018) in Mechanical Engineering, Caltech (with Tim Colonius)
  • (2016) M.S. Mechanical Engineering, Case Western Reserve University (with Alexis Abramson (now at Dartmouth) and Roger French)
  • (2015) B.S. Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Case Western Reserve University

Sketch

Dr. Ethan Pickering is an Associate Professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at the University of Georgia, where he leads the Computational Agriculture Lab at the intersection of computation and agriculture. Before joining UGA, he led AI research at Bayer Crop Science (2022-2025). He trained in mechanical engineering at Caltech (Ph.D., with Tim Colonius) and MIT (postdoc, with Themis Sapsis), working on reduced-order turbulence models and on discovering rare and extreme events with AI. Contact: ethan.pickering@uga.edu.

Awards

  • Thomas J. R. Hughes Fellow, U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (2021)

  • MIT Inaugural Postdoctoral Symposium Finalist (2021)

  • International Conference of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics Travel Grant (2020+1)

  • National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, Award Winner (2017)

  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Award Winner (Declined) (2017)

  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Honorable Mention (2016)

  • International Balfour Award of Sigma Chi (2016)

  • Clapp Memorial Graduate Scholarship (2016)

  • Michelson-Morley STEM Scholarship (2011)

Grants

  • ONR Grant No. N00014-16-1-2445 (with Tim Colonius): Next generation jet noise models for complex-geometry nozzles

  • ARPA-E Open 2015 (with Alexis Abramson), Virtual building energy audits

Collaborators