International Spring School 2026

Christian Huyghe will give a speech on how digital tools and biosolutions can transform agriculture into more resilient and sustainable systems. His vision bridges science and practice to design agriculture that serves both farmers and the planet.

Dr. Bélanger has been a full professor at Laval University since 1999 and held a Canada Research Chair in Plant Protection from 2001 to 2022. His research focuses on the development of genetic and biological control methods to suppress plant diseases. He has supervised and graduated more than 27 postdoctoral fellows, 20 doctoral researchers, and 42 master's researchers, and has published more than 200 scientific articles, cited nearly 20,000 times, making him one of the most productive researchers in the world in his field.

Dr. Natasha Iwanicki is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Entomology and Acarology at the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and a project manager at the Brazilian Association for Industrial Research and Innovation, where she works in a unit specializing in bio-inputs and biotechnological processes for agriculture. She holds a degree in agricultural engineering from the University of São Paulo and a master's degree in entomology from USP. She obtained a double doctorate in entomology and applied biology through a joint program between the University of São Paulo and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Philip Känel is a Swiss-German biologist and biotechnologist whose career spans the intersection of basic and applied research. After studying biotechnology at the University of Münster, he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Bern before returning to Germany, where he first worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster and subsequently continued his work at the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME.

At Fraunhofer IME, where he serves as a group leader (Gruppenleiter) of the Group AgriTechnologies, his research bridges fundamental biological questions with innovative agricultural applications. While his earlier work focused primarily on the biological mechanisms of aging and growth, including the study of phosphatidylethanolamine-binding proteins (PEBPs) and their role in development and longevity, his current activities increasingly emphasize the translation of molecular insights into practical crop technologies.