Madhu Khanna, Alvin H. Baum Family Chair, Director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), has been named a 2025 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the highest lifetime honors awarded to U.S. scientists.
Since 1874, the AAAS Fellows Program has annually recognized scientists, engineers, and innovators for their achievements across disciplines, including advancing research in their field, teaching and mentoring, leading scientific institutions or initiatives, communicating science to the public, applying science to policy or societal challenges, and more. Khanna was selected for her major contributions to Social, Economic, and Political Sciences.
In addition to her many roles, Khanna is the Associate Director of Technology Adoption & Public Policy at the AIFARMS National AI Institute for Agriculture. Here, she focuses on leading research efforts to understand economic factors that may influence farmers’ technology adoption decisions, including the capital and skill intensity of these technologies, their upfront financial and learning costs, and the yield gains and input cost savings they provide.
“I am grateful to have been selected as an AAAS Fellow this year. Working with other disciplines to address complex sustainability challenges has been a critical dimension of my research agenda. In particular, digital agricultural technologies and AI have significant potential to make agriculture more environmentally sustainable. Through collaborations with computer scientists, agricultural and biological engineers, and ecologists, including those made possible by CDA and AIFARMS, I have been able to grow my research examining the economic and behavioral drivers for adoption of these technologies and the role of policy and market-based incentives to induce adoption. I am excited about the opportunities for continuing to advance sustainability and make an impact through these collaborations,” said Khanna.
Funded by AIFARMS, Khanna worked alongside U. of I. ACES Professor Shadi Atallah to publish a joint publication with Texas A&M University and Argonne National Laboratory researchers on the adoption and outreach for semi-autonomous robots for weed control in corn-soybean systems. Their research focuses on sustainable alternatives, such as AI-enabled robotic weeders, to address the growing threat of herbicide resistance in crop production and the factors that affect the adoption of such technologies. Read more about their work in this article by the U. of I. College of ACES.
