Ning Wang
Photo: Owen Egan |
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You may not think much about what goes into pasta when you're slurping up spaghetti Bolognese, a typical dish of Italy. You almost certainly aren't daydreaming of our land's flat prairies, but Canadian durum wheat often makes up this food staple of students.
Agricultural and Biosystems Engineer Ning Wang has thought a lot about this grain, before she came to join McGill this past fall. She has created a machine that gauges the quality of the wheat grain: hardness, vitreousness (transparency), size, colour or whether or not it's damaged. This portable quality detector can be used on site in a grain elevator, to help determine the price and grade of the grain. "Now they're using human visual grading," Wang says, "which is time consuming, tedious, and difficult to control. It depends on too many variables, such as the light, the inspector."
Originally from China, Wang's first electrical engineering degree is from the China Agricultural University in Beijing. She then schooled in Thailand, earning an M. Eng in Industrial Engineering, where she stayed on and worked in telecommunications.
After two years, Wang says she realized she "missed university life very much. And somewhere in my heart, I knew I wanted to be a PhD and a teacher, like my dad."
Both of her parents are professors in Beijing, her mom in mechanical engineering, and her dad is a well-known academic in agricultural engineering, and a top member of the Chinese Academy for Engineering.
Her professor at Bangkok's Asian Institute of Technology recommended her to a university in Sweden in the area of Industrial Engineering. "Meanwhile I was introduced to Dr. Naiqian Zhang in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Kansas State University. Comparing the two fields, I was more interested in developing practical electronic systems and instruments for agricultural applications using my strong background in electronics."
Before she knew it, she was in Manhattan, Kansas, not knowing anything about the wheat state. After five years there, she feels as though Manhattan is one of her hometowns.
There she became involved in wheat research with the United States Department of Agriculture, while doing doctorate and post-doctorate research in agricultural engineering. Although grain research is big in Canada's prairie provinces, it's relatively new to McGill.
Wang didn't know much about McGill before coming here, except that "it has a very good reputation in North America." Her department has a policy in which she can devote her first semester there to proposal writing and settling in to Montreal with her nine-year-old daughter. "Our department gives very strong support," she says. She had taught in Kansas, but here she enjoys designing and teaching her own courses. "I like teaching and working with various undergrad and grad students because they bring new ideas -- I feel very happy when I find that they do learn something from my class and apply that in their projects and work."
Besides family, Wang still has close contacts with universities in China. She's also a member of the Association of Overseas Chinese Agricultural, Biological, and Food Engineers, which meets annually at the conference of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers to promote networking among engineers of Chinese origin and foster collaboration across borders. China sends about 20-30 researchers to the meetings to discuss strategies of Chinese agricultural development. As well, she's an editor of the international Journal of Bionics Engineering, published by the Key Laboratory of Terrian-Machine Bionics Engineering of China's Ministry of Education.
Wang's work involves designing sensors and microcomputer systems. She's excited about developing an autonomous weed detection machine to use in the fields of crops. The robotic device would be sort of like a wee tractor with visual sensors to guide it between rows of growing grain. "It would know when it got to the end of a row and turn around," Wang explains. "It would have a sensor in front and a nozzle in back, so when the system sees a weed, it sprays automatically."
The optical sensor would respond to the different refraction of the soil and plants. "Weeds have a different refraction from the grain. You have to train the system first to recognize the weed." Sort of like with voice recognition technology, she adds.
Not only does it save money to target and spray single weeds and spray them, Wang says, but it's also a relief to the environment.
