Kelly Caylor
An agricultural/environmental sensing monitor designed by Kelly Caylor and his team took third prize in the Keller Center’s 10th Annual Innovation Forum last week at Princeton University. PulsePod, a combination of hardware and software, provides in-field monitoring of crop health, microclimate, water and nutrients — information that is currently not easily available to farmers. The device communicates securely with Internet-based computers that store data and perform analysis that helps farmers to optimize their resources, said Caylor, associate professor in civil and environmental engineering and director of the ENV program. His team includes Adam Wolf, an associate research scholar in ecology and environmental biology, and Ben Siegfried, a Princeton alumnus and technical assistant in civil and environmental engineering. First and second prizes in the competition, which is for University researchers to present potentially marketable discoveries, went to Mark Esposito, for an enzyme-blocking method to stop the spread of cancer and to Blake Johnson for his 3-D printed personalized nerve regeneration technology.