Shivranjani Baruah graduated from Cornell University with a PhD in the field of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology in 2025. Her research spans fundamental molecular interactions between plants and pathogens to applied plant disease epidemiology and precision agriculture. Her graduate research focused on susceptibility genes, effector biology and imaging spectroscopy of bacterial diseases of rice.

Baruah is now a NASA Acres Postdoctoral Fellow in Katie Gold’s research group at Cornell AgriTech, where she is developing remote-sensing-based models to track grapevine viral diseases across Lodi, California. She is particularly interested in employing interdisciplinary approaches, ranging from genomics to geospatial data, to develop scalable, data-driven solutions for crop disease monitoring and management.

Baruah holds a master’s in microbiology from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta University, and a bachelor’s degree from Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. During graduate school, she was a visiting scholar at IRD Montpellier in France and at ICRISAT in India, and collaborated with the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA). She was also a recipient of the Cornell Green Technology Fellowship.