University of Toronto, Physical Geography and Environmental Studies, 2021, Doctorate

I am Dr. Phuong Dao, an Assistant Professor and the principal investigator of the Dao HyperAI Lab (Hyperspectral Remote Sensing & Agricultural Intelligence) in the Department of Agricultural Biology, Colorado State University. I am also a faculty in the campus-wide Graduate Degree Program in Ecology. I am a remote sensing and geospatial scientist and a plant scientist. I am broadly interested in understanding how plant-disturbance interactions and plant chemical response at the species level impact plant health, growth, and functioning by integrating multi-source remote sensing, geospatial science, genetic and molecular methods, biological modeling, and machine learning. I also developed and is currently advising the Agricultural Data Science undergraduate minor program. Prior to joining CSU, I was a Postdoctoral Associate (currently a partner) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (with Prof. Philip Townsend) and NSF-ASCEND Biology Integration Institute (directed by Prof. Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Prof. Philip Townsend, and Prof. Peter Reich). My postdoctoral research investigated the genetically-driven chemical defense in aspen forests in response to insect herbivore impact. I earned a dual PhD degree in Physical Geography and Environmental Studies from the University of Toronto in Canada. In PhD research, I investigated drought impacts on grassland native and invasive species functional traits. I earned an MSc in Remote Sensing Science and Technology from the National Central University in Taiwan and a BEng in Surveying Engineering from University of Mining and Geology in Vietnam.