Advisory Board
Merja Saarinen
Merja Saarinen, D.Sc., is a principal scientist from Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) with almost 20 years’ experience on food and nutritional LCA. She has been involved with LCAs for agricultural products, foods, meals and diets, as well as a methodological development related to LCA. Lately, she has been coordinating the development of N and P leaching modelling for agricultural LCA to update the model and make the assessment of eutrophication impact more precise in the Finnish circumstances, also applicable to organic production.
Pius Krütli
Pius Krütli (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) used to be senior scientist and co-director of the Transdisciplinarity Lab (TdLab) of the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich (www.tdlab.usys.ethz.ch). Transdisciplinarity is a scientific, more holistic approach that integrates knowledge (interests and values) from various sources both within and outside academia.
In the 15 years leading up to his retirement, transdisciplinarity, the science-society interface, became his focus. He was involved in, and (co-) led numerous transdisciplinary research projects on various topics such as (nuclear) waste, agriculture, energy, and sustainability in general, both in the Swiss/European context and in countries of the Global South.
Yuxin Miao
Dr. Yuxin Miao is a Professor of Precision Agriculture and Director of Precision Agriculture Center at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in precision agriculture and nutrient management, on-farm research, and remote sensing. With a focus on precision nitrogen management, his research also involves precision management of sulfur, seeding, irrigation and biostimulant, crop lodging, management zone delineation strategies, crop growth modeling, and on-farm trial data analysis. Dr. Miao founded the Minnesota On-farm Precision Agriculture Research Network, working closely with crop consultants and producers to conduct on-farm trials to develop and demonstrate new precision agricultural technologies. He is the founding leader of the International Society of Precision Agriculture (ISPA) Precision Nitrogen Management Community. He is the recipient of the Pierre C. Robert Precision Agriculture Young Scientist Award from ISPA in 2012, the Outstanding Chinese Alumni Award of University of Minnesota in 2014, American Society of Agronomy (ASA) Kingenta Agricultural Science Award in 2022, and ASA Tengtou Agriculrural Science Award in 2023. He is serving as Editor-in-Chief of European Journal of Agronomy and Associate Editor for Precision Agriculture.
Heinz Flessa
Heinz Flessa is the director of the Thünen Institute of Climate-Smart Agriculture in Germany. The institute is responsible for Germany’s reporting on greenhouse gas and ammonia emissions from agriculture. It conducts extensive experimental research on the quantification and reduction of climate-forcing emissions from agricultural soils and is responsible for the regular German agricultural soil inventory. The institute advises the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs on issues related to climate protection in agriculture and sustainable soil use. Heinz Flessa is an agricultural scientist and soil scientist. His research focuses on C and N transformation processes in soils, climate-forcing emissions, and the transformation and management of organic soil matter. He has 160 peer-reviewed publications and was recognized as a highly cited researcher in 2015 and 2016.