Marwa El Graoui
Education: Ph.D. ’25, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University
Cornell Faculty Mentor: Andrew McDonald, Cornell CALS / SIPS / Soil and Crop Sciences
External Adviser: Bouba Traore, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)
Themes: Increasing Food Security, Reducing Climate Risks
Leveraging Diversity for Climate Resilience and Food Security in the African Sahel
Marwa’s thesis is in the field of ecology and biodiversity with applications in geospatial data science and remote sensing. I am working on the exploration of the genetic and functional diversity of the Vigna genus, the assessment of its conservation status in Africa and climate change impact on its biodiversity.
She worked on predictive ecology for predicting how suitable croplands will be for wild species in future climatic conditions. And to explore the viability of cultivation of some opportunity crops in different climatic scenarios and determine in which ones of these scenarios they will be fit to replace staple crops. She has experience with both remote sensing (working on methods applied to soil mineralogy) and the generation of synthetic data (leveraging artificial intelligence) from recent projects she started with colleagues. She has also done a part of field work on a large collection of cultivated and wild species from the Vigna genus. Her team has conducted two field trials in two consecutive years during the summer cropping seasons. She also joined the Rebuild program at UM6P, aiming to rebuild the high atlas after last September’s earthquake in Morocco. They engaged with local communities in community mapping and identified solutions for their upcoming cropping season.
Through this fellowship, she intends expand her experience at the interface of food and agricultural sciences and data sciences to contribute long-term to the resilience and sustainability of food systems. Her primary goal is to benefit small-holder farmers for better livelihoods.