Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce that the winners of the Plants 2021 Young Investigator Award are Dr. Stefania Sut and Dr. Mohamed Ahmed El-Esawi.

Dr. Stefania Sut is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Pharmaceutical Science and Pharmacology at University of Padova (Italy). Her research interests include natural product chemistry, analysis of natural product, plant secondary metabolites and bioactive compounds from natural sources and food-based products using Mass Spectrometry, and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), liquid and gas chromatography and hyphenated techniques such as LC-MS/MS. Dr. Stefania Sut received her PhD in 2021 and has an outstanding publication record, comprising 93 publications in peerreviewed international journals. Her Scopus Scientific Citations number is 1187 and her Hirsch index is 20. She is clearly a rising star in the field of natural products. This is an outstanding achievement in today’s competitive environment. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Stefania Sut for her outstanding achievements.

Dr. Mohamed Ahmed El-Esawi is an Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics at the Botany and Microbiology Department, Faculty of Science, Tanta University, Tanta, Egypt. Dr. El-Esawi’s research interests are in molecular biology, biotechnology, genetics, genomics, molecular plant–microbe interactions, molecular plant physiology, developmental biology, and their bioinformatics applications. Dr. El-Esawi received his PhD degree in 2012 from Dublin Institute of Technology, Technological University Dublin in Ireland. He has an outstanding publication record, comprising 110 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and 4 international patents. His Scopus Scientific Citations number is 1993 and his Hirsch index is 30. He is clearly a rising star in the field of plant sciences and molecular biology. Dr. El-Esawi has received several awards and grants to date and ranked among the world’s top 2% scientists in his field. This is an outstanding achievement in today’s competitive environment. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Mohamed Ahmed El-Esawi for his outstanding achievements.

As the awardees, Dr. Stefania Sut and Dr. Mohamed Ahmed El-Esawi will each receive an honorarium of CHF 1000, an offer to publish a paper in Plants with a 50% discount in 2022 after peer review, and a certificate.

We would like to thank all the nominators from various fields of study for their participation and all the Award Committee Members for their evaluation of the many excellent nominations.

Prof. Dr. Dilantha Fernando
Editor-in-Chief, Plants