Alyssa K. Whitcraft, PhD

Alyssa is a Research Professor in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the founding Executive Director of NASA Acres, NASA’s agriculture consortium that focuses on strengthening U.S. agriculture. Her passion for agriculture and her vision for NASA Acres as a program that centers agriculture producers grew out of her experience as a winery kid in California. 

Prior to NASA Acres, she founded and continues to direct the Harvest Sustainable and Regenerative Agriculture Initiative, a 501(c)3 consortium of top scientists and innovators in remote sensing, modeling, agronomy, and soil science that aims to build a globally-consistent and site-relevant understanding of sustainable and regenerative agriculture practices and their outcomes. Harvest SARA grew out of NASA Harvest, NASA’s original food security and agriculture consortium that works internationally, for which she was the co-founding Deputy Director for its initial term (2017-2023). She has also served as Programme Scientist for the G20 global agriculture monitoring initiative (GEOGLAM) and as the agriculture lead for the consortium of the world’s space agencies (the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) for over a decade.