Current Students

Lucas de Lima Casseres dos Santos

Ph.D. Candidate, Agricultural and Biological Engineering

Salve! My name is Lucas Casseres, I am from Brazil, and I started my Ph.D. in Agriculture and Biological Engineering at Penn State University in the Spring of 2022. I am working with Dr. Chris Costello as part of the C-Change G2G project. In Costello Lab, I am working with a nutrient flow model to account for nutrient inputs to commodities produced in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and assessing opportunities to reduce them through best management practices, e.g., implementing perennial grasses in the land with a bioenergy purpose. My research background is in material flow analysis, life cycle assessment in agricultural systems, and bioenergy.

Divya Pant

Ph.D. Student

coming soon.

Zia Chowdhury

Ph.D. Candidate

Zia Uddin Md Chowdhury is a Ph.D. student in ABE with an emphasis on nitrogen and phosphorous flows analysis in the U.S. He earned his MS in Environmental Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Bangladesh), and BS in Leather Engineering from the University of Dhaka (Bangladesh). With his current and future research, he hopes to continue working on systems with less impact on the earth.

Former Students

Dr. Hai (Heidi) Nguyen

Dr. Nguyễn graduated from Penn State in 2021 after starting her degree at Mizzou. Her work applied statistical methods to climate projections and output from global gridded crop models to characterize risks to agriculture in the future. Check out her LinkedIn to learn more about her past and current work.

Dr. Sagar Gautam

Dr. Sagar Gautam graduated from Mizzou in 2018 and is now a Senior member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Labs. Dr. Gautam uses "computer simulation models and observation of environmental fluxes to assess the impacts of climate and land use change at field to global scale."

Brooke Goggins

Hello! My name is Brooke Goggins and I am from Greenbelt, Maryland.I graduated from the Biological Engineering department at Penn State in May of 2023. I am worked with Dr. Costello as a research assistant focusing on nutrient cycling in agricultural systems as a part of the C-CHANGE project. I have previously researched topics ranging from carbon sequestration to eutrophication on the Danube Delta. My research interests are in biogeochemical models for water quality and ultimately understanding how their outputs can effectively be communicated to improve policy. Brooke is currently a graduate student at Northwestern University.

DeWaunis Kelly, M.S.

Hello there! I'm DeWaunis Kelly, a native of North Carolina and graduate of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Penn State University. My passion lies in life cycle assessment, an area I've honed my expertise in. I'm thrilled to be an active participant in the Consortium for Cultivating Human And Naturally reGenerative Enterprises (C-CHANGE) project, an exciting initiative dedicated to promoting and fostering the adoption and implementation of perennials onto the landscape as a means to be co-digested with manure to produce biogas or RNG. DeWaunis is currently an intern at Noblis consulting.