Hi there 👋

I am an Agricultural Scientist working as Scientist for the Digital Inclusion Lever at The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT and Associate Professor on Data-Driven Agriculture at the Inland Norway University. I have broad experience in systems design, crop ecology and data science working in agriculture for development projects in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Currently, I coordinate the 1000FARMS Course, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build capacity in the agricultural national programs in Africa on decentralized experimental agriculture, data science, digital inclusion and participatory plant breeding. I also collaborate in several CGIAR initiatives and projects in Africa and Latin America on food systems issues related to digital inclusion, climate adaptation, systems transformation and crop improvement. I am commited to open-source data (and workflows) and most of my code is published in our Team Page on GitHub.

Want to do your research with me?

Send me an email (k dot desousa at cgiar dot org) if you are interested in my work and want some mentorship. We have access to plenty of data from on-farm trials around the world. Innitially, we can provide in-kind support (our time, data and expertise). However, scholarships or consultantships can be discussed once a research question or any other work matches the goals of our projects. Here some topic/questions that I can highlight.

• Impact of climate variability on crop variety performance (i.e. groundnut in Tanzania, sweetpotato in Ghana, sorghum in Tanzania and Nigeria, beans in Tanzania, cowpea in Nigeria, etc.)
• Curation of on-farm trial data in Africa, Latin America and Asia
• Farmers adoption to new varieties of African vegetables in Benin and Mali
• Drivers of farmers variety adoption decisions based on variety traits assessed on-farm
• The theory of change in plant breeding teams in Africa, from higher internal validity to higher external validity
• User-centred target product profiles (TPP) in plant breeding using citizen science data
• On-farm trial protocols to better capture heterogenous management practices in farmer fields
• Agroclimatic thresholds on crop physiological stages
• Better ways to provide feedback to participants in citizen science experiments
• And more...