$400K NSF grant to develop digital twin models for chickens granted to IEM professor

$400K NSF grant to develop digital twin models for chickens granted to IEM professor

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Media Contact: Desa James | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-2669 | [email protected]

Dr. Lizhi Wang - professor and Ken and Lynn Case Endowed Chair of industrial engineering and management at Oklahoma State University - has been awarded a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop digital twin models of chickens.

The project aims to understand how chickens respond to environmental stresses and improve poultry productivity and disease resistance.

Wang and his team will build digital twin models of chickens. These virtual models will simulate an actual chicken's physical and biological processes. This technology will help researchers predict how different breeds of chickens react to various environmental conditions, ultimately leading to better management practices and enhanced poultry health.

Wang will be working closely with two collaborators at OSU: Dr. Glenn Zhang, Regents Professor and Boulware Endowed Chair in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences, and Dr. Guiping Hu, professor and the Donald & Cathey Humphreys Chair and head of the School of Industrial Engineering and Management.

"Their combined expertise will be crucial in developing and validating the digital twin models," Wang said.

This additional funding is a Special Creativity Extension from the NSF to Wang's original grant, "LEAP HI GOALI: Engineering crops for genetic adaptation to changing environments." Initially, the team developed physiology-based and data-driven models for plant breeding and crop production, which proved beneficial in understanding plant physiology and improving crop productivity. That work sparked curiosity about developing and deploying a similar technology to animals.

"As an industrial engineer, I have been trained to use mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence to analyze complex systems," Wang said. "The more I read about plant and animal physiology, the more I appreciate nature for the complex and elegant designs in plant and animal species. A combination of these factors sparked my interest to explore how nature works with mathematical modeling and explainable AI."

Addressing global food challenges is a key motivation behind this research.

"There is too much food waste in certain parts of the world, too little access to healthy food in others, and significant inefficiencies in agricultural production," Wang said.

The digital twin technology aims to tackle these issues by improving poultry productivity and disease resistance.

The research team will include OSU students with animal and data science backgrounds, fostering a collaborative learning environment.

"They will learn from each other and work closely together as one team," Wang said.

The findings from this research will be integrated into classroom teaching materials, which Wang mentions are welcomed and appreciated by their students.

NSF describes this Special Creativity Extension as offering "the most creative investigators an extended opportunity to attack adventurous, 'high risk' opportunities in the same general research."

"We are thankful, honored, and empowered to receive this grant," Wang said.

You can learn more about Wang's research here.

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