Bruna Czarnobai de Jorge, Ph.D. student and visiting scientist at the Institute for Plant Protection in Fruit Crops and Viticulture in Dossenheim, was rewarded twice: The researcher from Brazil was declared N-GAGE Champion for her Ph.D. project. She also receives a travel grant to the IUPAC Next Generation Agri-Summit, which takes place in Ghent, Belgium, from 19th to 24th May.
More than 500 students from all around the world competed for the Next Generation Programme of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Czarnobai is one of 45 whose travel expenses to the conference in Ghent will be covered by IUPAC. 5 of those 45 were declared “Champions” – which comes with €5,000 prize money and professional support for her research project.
Czarnobai’s studies at the JKI are supervised by Dr. Jürgen Gross. In her project Czarnobai searches for ways to keep certain pests, especially psyllids of the genus Cacopsylla, away from their host plants in orchards. She isolates chemical compounds from different plants that attract or repel pests and examines those fragrances in the lab and also in the field. Czarnobai uses nanomaterials to lower the volatility of these so-called allelochemicals to solve the problem of their low stability.
- More about the conference in Ghent: https://www.iupac2019.be/