ICARDA's Research Fellow Receives Ain Shams University 2022 Innovates Award

We are thrilled to announce that ICARDA’s Doctoral Research Fellow Eng. Rania Gamal (Soil, Water, and Agronomy Research Team) has been awarded the Ain Shams University 2022 Innovates Second Prize in agriculture science for developing the Integrated Smart Management of Irrigation & Fertilization for Sustainable Agriculture smartphone application. 

Her innovative research aims at developing an all-in-one, cost-effective solution for the integrated management of agricultural water and nitrogen. The new application takes a novel approach that combines above- and below-ground information from innovative nitrogen measuring sensors, remote sensing maps, and artificial intelligence simulation models for different management scenarios based on real-time data assimilation. The affordable smartphone app makes previously expensive and inaccessible key data available to smallholder farmers, allowing them to increase crop water productivity, maximize yield production and minimize the excessive usage of fertilizers, especially nitrogen which is highly mobile and leaches easily; thus, excessive application, apart from economic losses, leads to contamination of surface and groundwater.  

Ain Shams Innovates competition, under the direction of Dr. Mahmoud Al-Matini, President of Ain Shams University, aims at encouraging, empowering, and supporting innovators and entrepreneurs to develop and share creative ideas in agricultural sciences and other domains, In accordance with the directives of the President of the Arab Republic of Egypt Abdel Fatah El-Sisi to shed light on innovative youth in social media and national programs, national tv (first channel) will host her on Sunday 31 of July to talk about her innovative solution for adopting new strategies and technologies to ensure optimal management decisions. 

She dedicates the prize to all her ICARDA colleagues for their support.  

She received her award in the presence of a high-level committee as shown in the photo left-to-right:

• A. D. Mohammed Al-Beheiri, Director of the Center for Innovation 

• A.D. Abdul Fattah Saud, Vice President of Education and Students 

• ICARDA’s Doctoral Research Fellow Eng. Rania Gamal

• Dr. Mahmoud Al-Matini, President of Ain Shams University 

• A.D. Ayman Saleh, Vice President for Graduate Affairs and Research 

• A.D. Zia Khalil, General Supervisor of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship