We are a team of scientists and business-people focused on maximizing the potential of each crop using advanced decision science.
Meet The Team
Kendra Armstrong PhD
Co-Founder
Kendra has worked in the agriculture space for more than two decades and specializes in leading teams to develop advanced computational tools for breeders and growers. At Crop Convergence, Kendra’s passion is to link science and business to support customers with the right decision tools for enterprise needs. Throughout her career, she has had the opportunity to work globally with several large food and agriculture companies, improving marketable yield, agronomics, and sustainability of many major row, fruit, and vegetable crops. In addition to her role at Crop Convergence, Kendra is an instructor for UC Davis Plant Breeding Academy and a consultant with AbacusBio. Dr. Armstrong holds a PhD from Iowa State University in Plant Breeding with minors in Statistics and Genetics.
Guiping Hu PhD
Co-Founder
Guiping brings more than 15 years of experience of research and higher education in the engineering and agriculture sectors. At Crop Convergence, Guiping focuses on the data-driven decision support system design and supply chain management areas. Guiping is also a faculty at Iowa State University, where her research has focused on operations research and data analytics with applications in bioinformatics, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy systems, and sustainable supply chain design. Guiping’s research has been supported by NSF, USDA, DOE, and DOD with over $11M in funding. She received the Mid-Career Research Award and has been recognized as a Plant Sciences Institute Scholar Fellow at Iowa State University. She has published over 90 journal articles and over 45 conference proceedings.
Lizhi Wang PhD
Co-Founder
Lizhi has more than 15 years of research experience at the intersection of operations research and plant sciences. His goal at Crop Convergence is to make a positive impact to humanity by providing effective and implementable solutions to the most important problems in agriculture. His data analytics tools have been shown at characterizing genotype by environment interactions, predicting crop growth, and prescribing optimal management practices when integrated with domain knowledge in plant biology and physiology. Lizhi is also a professor at Iowa State University where he has received $40M+ research funding, published dozens of new algorithms for crop growth analysis and plant breeding, and won the Syngenta crop challenge, which was about using agriculture data to inform seed breeding research and development.
