Plenary speakers

Firat Arslan is currently working in the Department of Biosystems Engineering, Rafet Kayış Faculty of Engineering, Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, Antalya/Türkiye. He started his academic career as a research assistant at Kahramanmaraş Sütçü İmam University and completed his master’s degree in Biosystems Engineering at the same university in 2016 and his doctorate in 2020. His doctoral thesis is on geospatial and statistical analyses in land consolidation projects, and his master’s thesis is on RAP-MASSCOTE approach in the modernization of irrigation schemes. He joined Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University as an assistant professor and received the title of associate professor in 2024. He has held administrative positions such as Director of the Research and Application Center at the university, served as Head of Department in the past, and served as Chairman of the External Relations Board in the Ministry of Youth and Sports. His main research interests include irrigation management, evaluation of land consolidation projects, geographic information systems. As part of his teaching activities, he teaches courses such as Geographic Information Systems, Irrigation, Drainage and Land Consolidation, and Hydraulics.

Lingling Li is a Dean of Agronomy college in Gansu Agricultural University, focusing on technical and theoretical research on conservation agriculture and rainfed farming systems for the Loess Plateau of China, finished more than 30 research projects funded by Australian Center for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), Ministry of Science and Technology of China, Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) etc., including 1 research project finished together with International Crops Research Institute for SemiArid Tropics (ICRISAT, India) team. She published more than 200 papers in the referred journals and conferences. She received 6 awards of “Advancement of Science and Technology” and “Natural Science” of Gansu province. Also, she was awarded “Outstanding Young Teachers in Universities” by “Fox Ying Tung Education Foundation” of Ministry of Education of China, received “Youth Award”, and “Leading Talent” award of Gansu Province.

Ilija Djekić is a full professor at the Faculty of Agriculture – University of Belgrade. Holding an engineering PhD in life-cycle assessment joint with over 25 years of experience in the food sector his teaching and research areas comprise of food sustainability, food safety and food quality modelling. To-date he lectured to over 1,200 students at all three levels of studies and supervised 30+ PhD and master’s theses. He participated in 15+ (inter)national scientific projects and his contracted scientific consulting was performed in 100+ food companies. His scientific portfolio is deployed to evaluating food industry performance by using existing and / or developing new diagnostic models and tools for analyzing food sustainability / food safety and food quality performance at product, process and company level and identifying improvement possibilities throughout the food supply chain. Ilija Djekić has (co-)authored more than 250 full papers out of which (180+) in journals included in the © ISI Web of Knowledge as well as ten chapters and five books. Since 2022, prof. Djekić has continuously appeared on the Stanford list of top 2% world’s most-cited scientists.

Branislava Lalic, Serbia

Lech Gałęzewski, Poland

Vojtěch Lukas, Czech