Dr. Alex Thomasson is Director of Mississippi State University’s (MSU’s) Agricultural Autonomy Institute (AAI), in addition to serving as Department Head of the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering (ABE). He founded AAI with funds he was awarded from the Hearin Foundation, a Mississippi charitable organization focused on economic development. Mississippi’s Institutes of Higher Learning approved AAI as a university-level institute at MSU in summer 2023. Thomasson, an ABE faculty member from 1997 through 2004, rejoined as Department Head in 2020 after years as a Professor and Endowed Chair at Texas A&M University. He came back to MSU with a vision of creating a focus on agricultural autonomy – i.e., autonomous machines and systems for agriculture – by integrating the sophisticated and synergistic capabilities he saw in MSU’s academic departments in agriculture and engineering as well as its related research centers and institutes. In 2020 he began putting together a working group that meets monthly and has ultimately grown to 50 members, who discuss collaborative research and funding opportunities in agricultural autonomy.

Dr. Thomasson started his career as a research engineer focused on sensors and control systems with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, working at the Cotton Ginning Research Unit in Stoneville, Mississippi. He moved from there to MSU, teaching and conducting research in precision agriculture. He later moved to Texas A&M where he focused on teaching and research in sensors and control systems and precision agriculture, and he ultimately became Endowed Chairholder in Cotton Engineering, Ginning, and Mechanization. Over the years his research interests moved in the direction of autonomous systems, because he recognized the critical nature of agricultural autonomy in light of the diminishing availability of agricultural labor and the growing world population and demand for food and fiber.

Dr. Thomasson earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Agricultural Engineering from Texas Tech University, a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering from Louisiana State University, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Engineering from University of Kentucky. Dr. Thomasson is also a registered Professional Engineer, and he was the 2023-2024 President of the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST), and he is a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE), the International Association of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (iAABE), and is a Senior Member of SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics. He also served on the Federal Communication Commission’s Precision Ag Connectivity Task Force working groups from 2020 through 2024.

Dr. Thomasson also belongs to the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the International Society of Precision Agriculture (ISPA), the North American Plant Phenotyping Network (NAPPN), the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Sigma Xi (The Scientific Research Honor Society).