Dr Alison McCarthy

• Senior Research Fellow
• University of Southern Queensland

Alison McCarthy is an irrigation and mechatronic Research Fellow within the Centre for Agricultural Engineering at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba. She has a BEng (Hons) in Mechatronics and PhD in Irrigation Engineering from the University of Southern Queensland. Her research with the cotton industry led to the development of real-time adaptive control and low-cost camera-based sensing systems to reduce labour in plant growth monitoring and improve and potentially optimise the irrigation of field crops. Her current projects involve the variable-rate irrigation of cotton, dairy, horticulture and sugarcane crops via lateral move and centre pivot irrigation machines and surface irrigation systems. She developed a simulation framework ‘VARIwise’ to aid the development, evaluation and management of spatially and temporally varied site-specific irrigation control strategies. Her research interests include irrigation decision-making and machine vision.

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