I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Soils Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working at the intersection of computational imaging, deep learning, and soil science.

My research focuses on synchrotron X-ray computed tomography (XCT) of soil aggregates and intact soil cores, with a particular emphasis on developing automated 3D segmentation pipelines to study pore-organic matter biogeochemical interfaces and their role in carbon cycling. I am an active user of the APS 2-BM beamline at Argonne National Laboratory, and I design and maintain HPC-based reconstruction and inference pipelines on ALCF Polaris and NERSC Perlmutter.

Research Interests

• Synchrotron micro-XCT data acquisition, reconstruction, and post-processing
• Transformer-based deep learning for 3D volumetric segmentation
• Self-supervised denoising (Noise2Inverse) and artifact correction
• Pore network analysis and soil organic matter spatial distribution
• HPC-accelerated imaging pipelines (GPU, tomocupy)
• Digital agriculture: tillage decision systems, crop yield prediction, remote sensing

Background

Before joining UIUC, I was a Ph.D. student and research assistant at Iowa State University in Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, where I worked on AI-enabled tillage decision systems and machine learning models for soil characterization. I also hold M.S. degrees from Iowa State University and National Taiwan University, where I conducted research in structural health monitoring and acoustic metamaterials.

News

• Jan 2026 — New paper published in Biosystems Engineering: “Tillage-induced soil feature extraction and multi-sensors fusion for tillage system classification”
• May 2026 — Paper published in Geoderma: “Comparison of automated chemical-guided segmentation and human annotation of soil organic matter in X-ray microcomputed tomography imaging in contrasted soil types”