UIC Engineering leads international consortium on greener pesticide spray management
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A group of scientists, engineers, and policymakers recently assembled in Kolkata, India, for the International Workshop on Greener Pesticide Spray Management Towards a Sustainable Future to address pesticide spray management, a critical challenge in agriculture around the globe.
“Due to pesticide resistance, environmental contamination, and potential health risks, it’s imperative that we come up with more effective but also more sustainable practices,” said Constantine Megaridis, UIC Distinguished Professor and James P. Hartnett Professor of Energy Engineering in MIE.
Megaridis co-organized the two-day workshop with Ranjan Ganguly, who received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UIC. Ganguly is now a professor of power engineering at Jadavpur University and an adjunct professor of MIE at UIC.
The gathering was part of a joint Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) program involving Jadavpur University (India lead), IIT Madras, and IIT Gandhinagar from India, and UIC (U.S. lead), Cornell University, Virginia Tech, and MIT from the U.S.
The discussions focused on pesticide spray management systems aimed at promoting a sustainable agricultural industry, addressing a wide range of practices within the sector. It was geared toward engaging leading academic and industrial experts at the forefront of wettability engineering, droplet-surface interactions, spray systems, pesticide management, groundwater pollution, and biosensors.
“These areas are critical for resolving scientific challenges in agricultural spray management. The SPARC team aims to inspire interdisciplinary initiatives in these critical fields and foster the next generation of devices and systems that researchers must develop for success,” said Megaridis, director of the Micro/Nanoscale Fluid Transport Laboratory at UIC.
To ensure the conversation and work continue, the SPARC program participants plan to exchange doctoral students who will come to the U.S. from India to work at UIC and Cornell University on problems that focus on spray droplet impact on leaves and the operational parameters that influence the retainment of liquid on the plant.