Nadia Shakoor has always had an interest in plants, so much so she decided to make a career out of it.
Shakoor is a senior research scientist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, where she operates her own research lab. She began at the Danforth Center in 2014 in a postdoctoral role in the lab of scientist Todd Mockler.
Shakoor is both a scientist and an entrepreneur, holding the roles of co-founder and CEO of St. Louis agtech startup Agrela Ecosystems. The company has developed a crop sensing and monitoring platform called PheNode.
“You can envision it like a weather station, but for plants,” Shakoor says of PheNode.
In addition to PheNode, Shakoor is also advancing another farm technology system called the FieldDock, a project backed by a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the National Science Found. READ MORE