Ankita Raturi

Ankita Raturi practices community-engaged research, participatory design, and open source software engineering to improve resilience and sustainability in food and farming systems. Through collaborations with farmers, policymakers, scientists and workers, Ankita co-creates responsible, accessible and inclusive digital tools that help to improve and balance economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Her formative decades in Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Australia and Fiji shaped her thinking of food systems, agriculture, ecologies and technology as place-based and interconnected commons. Her academic training as a software engineer, with emphasis on human-computer interaction, has informed how she thinks about appropriate technology, including the long-term value of utility, openness, usability, interoperability and maintenance of software. Her experiences with food, agriculture and technology communities across the United States has grounded her approach to better digital tools for managing agro-ecological complexity.

Ankita is an assistant professor of agricultural informatics at Purdue University, where she’s run the Agricultural Informatics Lab since 2019. She collaborates with cross-cutting communities of practice (e.g., small farmers, food coordinators, agricultural researchers). Together, they identify and prioritize research problems in digitally mediated work such as crop planning, environmental assessment, food policy making and knowledge management. Ankita and her collaborators develop digital tools for small farms, decision-support tools for regenerative agriculture, human-centered and ecologically oriented design methods, and practice community-led data and technology stewardship. As a professor, Ankita develops open courseware to help cultivate computational skills and design thinking among students and community stakeholders, and she facilitates student engagement in environmental and social good projects. In her broader work, Ankita advocates for responsible, accessible and inclusive digital tools in partnership with farmers, researchers, coders and allies. In 2018, she co-founded the Gathering for Open Ag Tech, a space to build consensus and cultivate relationships across multiple aligned visions for the future.

For more information about her work, visit https://aginformaticslab.org/ and https://goatech.org/.