BOZEMAN - Shehzore Hashmi is considering a career in academia. Or perhaps he'll pursue a career in industry. Either is a possibility. But first, the second-year doctoral student at Montana State University needs to get his drone pilot's license.

Hashmi, who came to MSU in 2025, is studying electrical and computer engineering in MSU's Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering.

"One of my major research areas is developing methods for detecting Potato Virus Y at the individual-plant level using imagery collected by unmanned aerial vehicles," he said, referring to drones carrying specialized camera equipment.

Potato Virus Y infects potatoes and other crops, causing disease that can reduce plant health and quality, and crop yields.

The interdisciplinary team he works with at MSU is combining standard color photography and multispectral imagery, which captures wavelengths of light the human eye can't see, with machine learning and computer vision to identify individual potato plants showing symptoms of Potato Virus Y far more efficiently than traditional field scouting. The goal is to produce disease maps and decision-support tools that can direct growers' field scouting and crop management decisions, which includes removing the sick plants from the field.

The path that brought Hashmi to that research began some 7,500 miles away.

Hashmi is from Hyderabad, Pakistan, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 2 million people located along the Indus River. It was here that he found an unconventional on-ramp to his academic interest in engineering when, at 5 or 6, he became fascinated by Shehzore commercial trucks he saw on the roads. The trucks caught his attention initially because they shared his name, but soon he was studying their designs.

"Trucks that had my name was the starting point for me," Hashmi said.

In high school, he learned the basics of engineering by auditing free courses offered online by Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Then, in 2022, devastation struck. Record monsoon rains caused catastrophic flooding across Pakistan, including in the Hyderabad region, claiming more than 1,700 lives, displacing nearly 8 million people and destroying infrastructure and homes. A junior at the city's Isra University when the floods hit, Hashmi experienced the devastation firsthand. The experience strengthened his desire to use engineering as a means to help others.

"At that point, I knew I wanted to use my engineering skills to help vulnerable and underrepresented people," Hashmi said.

The floods also sparked his interest in climate science and reinforced his interest in applying engineering to real-world problems.

He explored these interests and others this past summer during three research and training programs: at Columbia University, in climate data science communication; at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he studied AI and machine learning in fundamental physics; and remotely through Florida Atlantic University, exploring cybersecurity skills and practices.

At Columbia, through the LEAP Summer Momentum Fellowship, Hashmi studied climate data science communication.

"My project was basically climate data science communications, where I was communicating AI, machine learning, data science and climate modeling to nontechnical audiences," Hashmi said.

Communicating science to lay audiences, he said, is a critical part of the research process.

"Science communication should be a part of our research," Hashmi said. "If we are doing research, and if we are not communicating it to the general audience, then I think there is a gap."

The virtual NSF CyberTraining program at FAU provided training across several areas of engineering and computing.

"The program provided training in areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, power and energy systems, and emerging smart-grid technologies," he said. "It was particularly useful for seeing how AI and computational methods can be applied to real-world energy and engineering challenges."

And, finally, rounding out his notably busy summer, Hashmi attended the NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions Summer School at UMass Boston. There, he explored AI and machine learning in fundamental physics and participated in a competition in which his interdisciplinary team won the Best Project Award.

"Coming from an electrical engineering and applied AI background, it was valuable to see how researchers in fundamental physics approach AI problems and how similar computational methods can be adapted across scientific disciplines," he said.

While Montana agriculture is dominated by crops such as wheat, hay, lentils and barley, Hashmi's MSU research is especially important to Montana's seed potato farmers. MSU Extension, which describes the state as one of the nation's leading producers of seed potatoes, provides statewide, research-based education and resources to help Montanans address needs in agriculture, families and communities, youth development, and natural resources.

Hashmi, who expects to earn a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering while pursuing a doctoral degree, has earned multiple distinctions and won multiple awards since arriving at MSU. These include a nearly $30,000 Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, or SARE, Graduate Student Grant to go toward his drone-enabled research on Potato Virus Y in seed potatoes. He has also received a $1,500 seed grant through MSU's NSF Extreme Biofilms National Research Traineeship Program supporting training and dissemination in AI-enabled grid science, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to study, operate and improve the electrical power grid.

Hashmi conducts this interdisciplinary research with his doctoral adviser, Bradley Whitaker, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and collaborates with Paul Nugent, an assistant professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences in MSU's College of Agriculture.

"I was particularly interested in working with Bradley Whitaker and having the opportunity to apply my engineering background to research with real-world impact," Hashmi said.

At the same time, Nugent brings the precision agriculture and optical sensing side of the collaboration.

"I selected [Montana State] because of its strong faculty," Hashmi said. "The research opportunities are really good here. And the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has a good history, and MSU offers programs such as optics and agriculture. And also, when I talked with the faculty, they were really nice and very welcoming. The research environment here is really good."

"Hashmi's work highlights the remarkable opportunities that emerge when talented students engage in interdisciplinary research," said Alison Harmon, MSU's vice president for research and economic development. "By combining expertise from engineering and agriculture, this team is advancing technologies that can help producers make better decisions while giving students hands-on experience solving complex challenges. This is the land-grant mission in action."

Hashmi hopes the research will ultimately give growers a practical tool for identifying disease across entire crop fields.

First, though, he needs to get that drone pilot's license.