Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the two awardees of the 2020 Travel Award for PhD Researchers:

Mr. Ahmed Kayad, a PhD student at Digital Agriculture Lab, University of Padova, Italy, is studying agricultural engineering and sustainable precision and digital agriculture. His current work focuses on monitoring crop yield spatial variability at the field scale from remote and ground sensors. He is planning to attend the 15th International Conference on Precision Agriculture (held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, 28 June–1 July, 2020). Here, he will present his research entitled “Monitoring Corn (Zea mays) Yield Using Sentinel-2 and Machine Learning for Precision Agriculture Applications”.

Mr. Roberto Berni, a PhD student at University of Siena, has developed a strong interest in the valorization of plant biodiversity. He carries out research on characterization of plant secondary metabolites used for nutraceutical purposes. He will attend the “Plant Biology Europe 2020 congress” (held in Turin, Italy, 29 June–2 July 2020), where he will present his research entitled “Valorising Non-Commercial Tuscan Varieties of Sweet Cherry: A Metabolomics and Gene Expression Study”.

Please join us in congratulating Mr. Ahmed Kayad and Mr. Roberto Berni for their outstanding achievements. As the awardees, Mr. Ahmed Kayad and Mr. Roberto Berni will receive an honorarium of 600 Swiss Francs and a certificate.

We would like to thank all the applicants from various fields of study for their participation as well as all the Award Committee members for their careful evaluation of the large number of excellent applications.