Brian works for The Climate Corporation, the world's leading digital agriculture company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Monsanto, where he leads the SmartYield research program.  This program focuses on identifying, describing, diagnosing and predicting patterns of crop yield performance using the richest agricultural datasets available in the world.  Having grown up on a large family grain farm in Ohio before earning his PhD in biogeochemistry and ecosystem ecology through Duke's University Program in Ecology, Brian works at the interface of his two passions -- science and agriculture -- to help growers meet the challenges of feeding a growing population, as well as to improve the sustainability of agricultural practices.