Sofia Ferdini
Bridging Agriculture and Climate for a Sustainable Bioeconomy
Sofia Ferdini is currently doing her PhD on the Potential of growing industrial crops on marginal lands (thesis 3.2) at AgroParisTech and the University of Hohenheim.
Hello! My name is Sofia Ferdini, and I’m from Germany.
My PhD research focuses on developing a global database of bioenergy crops grown on marginal lands. This database will improve the calibration of crop models, enabling more accurate simulations of bioenergy systems on marginal lands. Ultimately, my work aims to produce more realistic bioenergy scenarios by reducing the yield overestimations that characterise previous modelling of bioenergy production on marginal lands. I carry out my research at AgroParisTech, France and University of Hohenheim, Germany.
I have many side passions (and I admittedly struggle to say no!), so alongside my PhD research I am also involved in several collaborative projects. One of these focuses on promoting the inclusion of young people and early-career researchers in the bioeconomy research community: Together with several fellow Doctoral Candidates (DCs) in the DESTINY project, I have been exploring how youth inclusion in the bioeconomy has been experienced to date, using a case study. I also work on bias adjustment of climate data to support crop modelling, and I am thinking and writing about interdisciplinarity within the DESTINY project.
I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Science, where I focused on the identification of climatically marginal lands for growing bioenergy crops in Europe (talk about foreshadowing!). During my Master’s in Climate Science, I used a regional climate model to explore how a changing crop phenology and the regional climate interact with each other. I then worked with the European Space Agency’s climate team, where I researched how Earth observation satellites monitoring agricultural landscapes from space can help address climate challenges, like the provision of sustainable bioenergy or adaptation of agriculture to climate change.
When I’m not working, I enjoy reading, birding, gardening on my balcony, and nature observation.