Short Biography

Dr. Bryan Runck is the Associate Director of GeoCommons, Principal Investigator of the Real-time GeoInformation Systems Lab, and Lead of the Sensing Service Organization in the GEMS Informatics Center. His work focuses on developing real-time, geospatial artificial intelligence systems. The majority of Dr. Runck’s work is done in the context of multi-disciplinary teams and public-private partnerships. Currently, his group manages over 2,400 wireless connected devices deployed on three continents with application areas including agricultural risk mitigation, irrigation water management, land conservation planning, and plant phenotype characterization and prediction.

Long Biography

Dr. Bryan Runck is the Lead of GEMS Sensing in the GEMS Informatics Center at the University of Minnesota - a jointly founded initiative between the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. He also serves on the Faculty of the Masters of Geographic Information Science Program and the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota. He holds an M.S. in the Applied Plant Sciences from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, and a PhD in Geography and minor in Computer Science focused on geocomputing.

Broadly, Dr. Runck studies and applies geocomputing techniques to address complex food, agriculture, and environmental challenges. He has published over 25 peer-reviewed publications in top journals such as Nature Climate Change, Crop Science, and Global Biogeochemical Cycles, and has been invited to speak at Harvard, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the University of Hawaii - Manoa. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator on projects that have received over $9.5 million in funding, including funding from the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Agriculture.

Dr. Runck’s lab consists of electrical engineers, biosystems engineers, geographic information scientists, and computer scientists. They have extensive experience in end-to-end data collection and decision support systems, including deploying sensing systems in the field and collecting, integrating, and analyzing live streams of data from multisensor nodes, and model delivery and visualization for end-users. Lab members have deployed sensing systems in agricultural contexts across North America and sub-Saharan Africa, as well as for environmental monitoring on glaciers in South America. Over the past decade, Dr. Runck has supported the management of roughly a dozen projects that each involved teams of 10 or more researchers with over 60 people across the non-profit and for-profit agricultural community. In addition to his professional work, he grew up farming corn and soybeans with his family near Lamberton, MN, where he continues to get inspiration for on-going research and development projects.