Q & A with Alex Olenskyj

We continue our GEMINI member spotlight series with Postdoctoral Researcher, Alex Olenskyj.

Please introduce yourself: who are you, where are you from, and what is your educational/professional background?

AO: Hello! My name is Alex Olenskyj and I’m a postdoctoral researcher working with the Sensing Team within GEMINI. I’m originally from Northern New Jersey and I completed my B.S. in Chemical Engineering with a concentration in Biomolecular Engineering and Minor in Food Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016 (quite a mouthful, I know). From there, I moved to Davis to pursue a PhD in Biological Systems Engineering, again with a Minor in Food Science, which I completed in 2021.

During my undergraduate tenure, I had two summer internships with the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, where I worked on crystallization of sugar alcohols and extrusion for producing crunchy and chewy products, respectively. My undergraduate research was in development and characterization of a method to produce nanoparticles from zein, a corn protein byproduct. At Davis, my dissertation work focused on nondestructive imaging combined with machine learning for quantitative analysis of biological systems, such as mechanical property prediction of apple tissue from X-Ray micro-CT images and yield estimation of grapevines from RGB images.

What is your role within GEMINI?

AO: As part of the Sensing Team, I help collect, manage, and process the data collected in the field during the growing season with the goal of extracting meaningful, quantitative metrics that can be used to assess plant traits. The largest source of data in this project is image data, and an important tool for obtaining interpretable metrics from image data is machine learning, making my graduate research particularly relevant to this project.

How did you end up working with GEMINI and what interests you most about this project?

AO: Dr. Mason Earles advised me during my graduate research, and due to the overlap between that research and the goals of the GEMINI project, I was offered the opportunity to apply what I had learned to a new crop in new environments with different tasks. One of the most interesting aspects of this project for me is the application of the work to increasing yield and quality of common beans. For context, one of my favorite classes at Illinois discussed the Green Revolution, and how developments in technology have been used over the years to rapidly improve corn yield to feed our growing population all over the world. Within GEMINI, I’m excited to be part of the team bringing similar benefits to bean and sorghum crops by leveraging novel technology.

Is there anything particularly exciting you are working on now or in the near future that you would like to share?

AO: At the moment, we’ve been working on georeferencing plants in the field using multiple imaging modalities (proximal rover images as well as drone imagery). This will allow us to not only follow plant plots over the growing season, but also individual plants within a plot such that we can assess growth rate, flowering time, and other traits on a more precise level. Using this increased precision can help increase the certainty we have in our analyses and reflects a benefit of using image sensors along with GPS to collect data during breeding trials.

What do you like to do outside of work (personal hobbies and interests)?

AO: Outside of work I like to hang out with my cat, Milo. I am also a hobbyist photographer, which happens to translate well over to my research into camera-based sensing. Finally, I’ve recently taken an interest in 3D printing and design for use around my home, mostly for mounting objects to the wall or on stands.