Susan Metzger, Lead, Education and Outreach Aim

Kansas State University

Susan Metzger leads strategic interdisciplinary initiatives at Kansas State University, where she collaborates with university leadership and external partners to advance integrated agricultural programs. With a background in biological sciences and leadership communication, she brings deep expertise in water policy, natural resource management, and stakeholder engagement. Prior to joining K-State, she held leadership roles at the Kansas Department of Agriculture and the Kansas Water Office, where she played a key role in shaping the state’s water future. Her work supports the university’s land-grant mission by fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration and applied research that addresses critical challenges in water security and sustainable agriculture.

Krishna Jagadish, Lead, Technical Aim

Texas Tech University

Dr. Jagadish is the Thornton Distinguished Chair of Plant & Soil Science with Texas Tech University, directing the research and coordinating the TeCSIS-TAWC program (Texas Coalition for Sustainable Integrated Systems Research Program and the Texas Alliance for Water Conservation). He also serves as Director of the Davis College Water Center. His research program at Texas Tech focuses on optimizing forage-based cropping  systems, developing new tools to enhance water conservation and improve soil health. The goal of his program is to effectively integrate forage-crop-livestock components to enhance economic benefits and environmental sustainability in the Southern High Plains. On the USDA SatRAP project, Dr. Jagadish and team will be responsible for the establishment and operation of the Eddy Covariance LICOR 710 ET system, including 5-6 different soil moisture sensors i.e., aquaspy, autonomous pivot, GoField, Sentek drill and drop etc. as a technology demonstration site on a producer field. In addition, his team will identify 15 different producer fields in 5 different counties in west Texas, install soil moisture measuring technology and obtain producer records for all these producers.  He will be responsible for reporting the progress achieved in the west Texas region and will ensure the overall objectives as planned are completed. 

Kevin Wagner, Lead, Socio-Economic Aim

Oklahoma State University

As Director of the Oklahoma Water Center, Dr. Wagner provides leadership and administration of the Center’s programs; leads efforts to increase engagement with the water resources community across Oklahoma and the U.S.; and facilitates development of inter-disciplinary teams to address high priority water resources issues.  His research and Extension efforts aim to: (1) strengthen stakeholder engagement by integrating science with human systems for water policy and management; (2) advance watershed assessment, planning, and sustainability; (3) improve understanding of water use and conservation adoption; and (4) promote private land stewardship by evaluating conservation practices and addressing adoption barriers. As part of the USDA SatRAP project, he leads the Socio-Economic Team, assisting with policy development and evaluation. 

Jonathan Aguilar, Education and Outreach Aim

Dr. Jonathan Aguilar is a Professor and the Extension Irrigation Specialist of K-State stationed in Garden City, Kansas at the SW Research-Extension Center. Aguilar’s expertise is in water management, particularly limited irrigation strategies, soil and plant sensor technologies, improved irrigation management practices, water quality and quantity assessments, applied field research, and online management decisions. His role in the SatRAP is bridging the gap between the technology and adoption by the end users, particularly irrigated farmers.  

Ignacio Ciampitti, Technical Aim

Perdue University

Ignacio Ciampitti, a quantitative agronomist with a focus on the integration of digital agriculture in the context of complex farming systems. With a strong academic foundation, including a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of Buenos Aires and Ph.D. in agronomy from Purdue, Ciampitti’s research explores the integration of crop eco-physiology and plant nutrition with data science, remote sensing, and crop modeling tools. Ciampitti has trained many graduate students, research scholars and post-doctoral researchers, and led critical key projects with industry and farmers around the globe. 

For this project, his role will be to help integrate the crop phenology models with irrigation data to develop effective decision support tools for improving water use and irrigation. 

Bill Golden, Socio-Economic Aim

Kansas State University

Dr. Golden focuses on research in natural resources and farm management issues related to irrigation and the production of agricultural commodities. Specifically focusing on evaluating water policy and usage, and the impacts these have on the environment, producers and the regional economy. For the SatRAP grant Dr. Golden develop and apply economic models to evaluate producer decisions and impacts on the regional economy. He will apply temporal allocation models to evaluate the impacts of various policies. These models will incorporate field-scale water use efficiency calculated in this research.

Bridget Guerrero, Socio-Economic Aim

West Texas A&M University

Dr. Guerrero's research interests include economic analysis of production agriculture, socioeconomic modeling, water policy, and regenerative agricultural practices. She is originally from Vega, Texas where her family farms. In this project, she will estimate the regional economic impacts of producer transition from irrigated agriculture to dryland crop production and pasture. She will engage regularly with the research team to identify all direct impacts that may cause spillover effects on the regional economy and broader community overall for the transition to dryland identified in this proposed work as aquifer levels deplete. 

Amy Hardberger, Socio-Economic Aim

Texas Tech University School of Law

Dr. Hardberger's work focuses on the intersection of water with other disciplines. Her academic writings focus on shared water governance, international water law, energy/water nexus, water pricing, the human right to water and Texas groundwater.  For this project, she will be evaluating the role of law and policy in creating incentives or limitations on the adoption of conversation-based technologies and practices. 

Gaurav Jha, Technical Aim

Kansas State University

Dr. Jha's research focuses on integrating sensor-based technologies, and geospatial analytics to improve decision-making in site-specific crop and water management. At Kansas State University, he leads the Digital Agronomy Research Team (DART), working across disciplines to support sustainable agricultural practices in the Great Plains. Within the SatRAP project, Dr. Jha will contribute to technical innovation and on-farm demonstration of precision irrigation systems, helping to evaluate water use efficiency, crop response, and the role of remote and proximal sensing tools in improving resource stewardship. 

Lee Johnson, Technical Aim

California State University - Monterey Bay

Lee Johnson is a Senior Research Scientist at California State University Monterey Bay, and is jointly affiliated with the Earth Science Division at NASA Ames Research Center. His focus is on agricultural applications of remote sensing with emphasis on crop evapotranspiration, and he is a member of the OpenET team. He has served as PI or co-investigator on several federal and state grants and authored/co-authored almost 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and technical book chapters. Lee supports SatRAP’s Technical Aim, primarily with regard to utilization of OpenET data.

Dayton Lambert, Socio-Economic Aim

Oklahoma State University

Dayton Lambert is a Professor and Willard R. Sparks Chair in Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University. He holds a degree in Agricultural Economics from Purdue University (PhD) and Aquaculture & Aquatic Sciences from Auburn University (MS). His research and teaching programs focus on production economics, technology adoption, and regional economic impact analysis. He served as a research economist with the United States Department of Agriculture Economics Research Service, 12 years as a faculty member at the University of Tennessee, and now OSU. 

Sara Larsen, Education and Outreach Aim

Open ET

Sara Larsen is the CEO of OpenET, leading efforts to provide accurate and accessible evapotranspiration data to support sustainable water management across the United States. With over two decades of experience in water resources and data innovation, she is dedicated to advancing open science and collaborative approaches to addressing water challenges. Previously, Sara served as Deputy Director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, where she helped advance scientific tools and collaborative modeling for the Colorado River Basin.

On the SatRAP grant, OpenET integrates satellite-based ET data into irrigation scheduling and decision-support tools, supports producer beta-testing, and embeds OpenET training in regional education programs. As part of this work, the OpenET nonprofit develops user-focused training modules, documents use cases that demonstrate water savings and aquifer benefits, and incorporates producer feedback to refine tools and outreach materials.

Forrest Melton, Technical Aim

Earth Science Division, NASA Ames Research Center

Forrest currently serves as an Associate Program Manager for Agriculture with the NASA Earth Action Program and as the NASA Project Scientist for OpenET. Since 2003, he has worked in the Atmospheric and Biospheric Science Branches at NASA Ames Research Center on the development of modeling and satellite-driven decision support frameworks including OpenET, the Satellite Irrigation Management Support (SIMS) system, the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), and the Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS). His research interests include applications of satellite data to improve management of natural resources, remote sensing of evapotranspiration and agricultural water requirements, and ecosystem and carbon cycle modeling. 

AJ Purdy, Technical Aim

California State University - Monterey Bay | NASA ARC-CREST

Dr. A.J. Purdy is a senior research scientist and adjunct faculty in the Department of Applied Environmental Science at CSUMB and NASA Ames Research Center. He supports coordination and science advances for OpenET and currently serves as a Science Team technical expert for NASA’s Western Water Applications Office. His research experience includes the development of satellite-driven evapotranspiration models, ground ET measurements, and development of actionable information from scientific data. He is interested in developing tools and applications of scientific models and data to support water management. Dr. Purdy’s research experience has leveraged data from multiple NASA satellite missions (Landsat, MODIS, OCO-2, SMAP, GRACE, and ECOSTRESS) to study changes in water availability and model water cycling. Dr. Purdy’s role on the SatRAP project will be supporting the technical objectives related to ground-based ET measurement and applications and analysis of OpenET data.

Sumit Sharma, Extension and Outreach Aim

Oklahoma State University

Sumit Sharma's overall research focus is on irrigation management in row crops in western Oklahoma. In this regard, he manages irrigation with limited well capacities and irrigation optimization for low water demanding crops, and he investigates methods to include cover crops in existing cropping systems in the central high plains. 

Jean L. Steiner, Socio-Economic, Education and Outreach Aims

Kansas State University

Dr. Steiner was appointed by Governor Laura Kelly to the Kansas Water Authority in 2020 and is committed to supporting innovative policies that can sustain the sustainability of water resources in the state of Kansas and beyond. In 2022 the KWA issued a policy statement rejecting the state’s prior “planned depletion” approach to management of the Ogallala Aquifer. Working with this project, the group plans to explore how state and local entities that operate under a diversity of legal and policy frameworks can address shared objectives to protect the Ogallala Aquifer resource and the economies and communities that are built on that resource. Prior to this project, Steiner worked as a USDA Agricultural Research Service researcher on a wide range of irrigated cropping, rainfed cropping, and grazing systems in arid to humid regions, with emphasis on climate adaptation and sustainability of agriculture at field to watershed scales. In addition to water policy work with the Socio-Economic Team, she will support the project’s mentoring program, led by the Education and Outreach Team.   

Brownie Wilson, Technical Aim

Kansas Geological Survey

Research interests include GIS application development, groundwater modeling, and data processing related to water resource management.  Primary role in the SatRAP grant is to work with other team members and collaborators to establish relationships between groundwater pumping (or a proxy) and water-level change in order to provide a measure of any reductions in water usage needed, on average, to stabilized water levels for the next decade or two. 

Joey Young, Education and Outreach Aim

Texas Tech University

Dr. Young's research focuses on applied solutions to guide sustainable turfgrass management for lawns, athletic fields, and golf courses. Much of his work addresses water conservation and quality challenges experienced in these managed turfgrass systems. Additionally, he has been completing a USDA-Education and Workforce Development grant centered around developing educational curriculum for high school teachers to confidently teach turfgrass management to their students. These experiences have opened doors and created experiences that will allow him to build broader course curriculum to be implemented in high schools or colleges to instruct key principles and findings from other aims to the next generation of water users and decision makers. 

Sam Zipper, Technical Aim

Kansas Geological Survey

Sam Zipper leads the HydroEcology of Anthropogenic Landscapes (HEAL) group as an assistant scientist at the Kansas Geological Survey and assistant professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas. His research program uses models, data science, and field observations to understand how local, regional, and global change impact the water resources of Kansas and the Great Plains region now and in the future. On the SatRAP project, he is part of the technical team focused on developing OpenET-based models of water use. See samzipper.com for more information.