SDSU doctoral student earns international research travel awards

South Dakota State University researcher Swas Kaushal is part of a new generation of scientists blending technology and agriculture — and his work is gaining global attention through two major travel awards. 

He was awarded the Wheat Initiative Phenotyping Expert Work Group Early Career Research Travel Award to attend the European Plant Phenotyping Training School and Symposium in Bonn, Germany, from Sept. 12-15, as well as the Early Career Travel Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding from May 19-23 to present his work at the association’s annual meeting in Hawaii. 

“The experience was surreal,” Kaushal, who studies in the Department of Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science, said. “Winning the travel awards felt like a dream come true.” 

Kaushal was the only student from the United States selected by the Wheat Initiative to attend the training program in Germany. Growing up in a small farming village in India, he never could have imagined that his research journey would take him across the world to share his work on modern wheat breeding. 

Both conferences provided Kaushal with valuable new insights and global exposure. In Hawaii, Kaushal learned how breeders are using native traits and wild species to improve crops like coffee and tropical fruits. While in Germany, he experienced firsthand how European teams are pushing the boundaries of automation, artificial intelligence and data integration in plant phenomics. 

These experiences further solidified Kaushal’s vision of a more predictive, data-driven approach to breeding, which he is now applying during a Field Crop Breeding Phenomics internship with Syngenta while he continues his research at SDSU. 

These recognitions not only celebrate Kaushal’s research achievements, but also highlight the global relevance of his work, which addresses one of the most persistent challenges in wheat breeding: accurately predicting grain yield across a variety of environments and years. 

Kaushal’s Ph.D. research centers on developing resilient and high-yielding wheat varieties that are essential to meeting the needs of farmers and sustaining agricultural productivity. 

“Traditional models often struggle to generalize across different datasets,” Kaushal said. “My research uses deep transfer learning to create models that can perform reliably across years, locations, nurseries and growth stages.” 

This approach, which builds on his earlier publication titled “Enhancing the potential of phenomic and genomic prediction in winter wheat breeding using high-throughput phenotyping and deep learning,” is designed to make plant breeding more predictive, scalable and efficient. This is a critical achievement as global food security faces increasing pressure from climate change and resource constraints. 

In addition to yield prediction, Kaushal’s research is expanding to include traits like tiller count, stay-green (a heat stress tolerance indicator) and grain quality attributes, with the broader aim of improving both productivity and end-use quality for South Dakota’s winter wheat varieties. 

He credited much of his success to his advisor, Sunish Sehgal, SDSU professor and winter wheat breeder. He noted that Sehgal has been an incredible mentor and is always encouraging him to explore new ideas and technologies and that his support has made a huge difference in his Ph.D. journey. 

Sehgal commended Kaushal for his ability to understand complex technologies and apply them to real-world challenges. Sehgal said Kaushal entered the program with a solid foundation in genetics and field research and is an exceptionally quick learner who connects plant breeding, drone technology and machine learning and that his work has significantly advanced their breeding efforts. 

“These awards give Swas well-deserved visibility within the global scientific community,” Sehgal said. “They will open new doors for collaboration and career growth.” 

With more than 10 awards to his name during his Ph.D., Kaushal’s recent recognitions are the latest milestones in a journey that began in a rural village in India and is now shaping the future of wheat breeding. 

For Kaushal, the message is simple but powerful: “If you keep doing good work consistently, the results will eventually follow.” 

With research that now spans continents and a multitude of technologies, Kaushal is not just following results, he is helping advance the future of wheat breeding.