Two New E4D Doctoral Fellows join ETH
We are excited to introduce you to two new E4D Doctoral Fellows: Fatemeh Adelisardou and Jean Modeste Mushimiyimana. Fatemeh will create and test a model to evaluate water resource supply and demand among smallholder rice farmers in Iran. Jean Modeste will develop a user-friendly modelling tool that can be used to monitor methane extraction in Lake Kivu, Rwanda.
The goal of the Engineering for Development Doctoral Fellowship Programme is to foster research with a global impact and to educate future reseachers from low- and low-middle-income countries. The call for applications in 2023 awarded two fellowships to Fatemeh Adelisardou and Jean Modeste Mushimiyimana, who began their research at ETH in spring 2024.
Meet Fatemeh Adelisardou
Fatemeh Adelisardou is a driven agri-environmental researcher with a strong passion for understanding how ecosystems function and how they can provide sustainable services to society under climate change. Her primary focus is on developing solutions for climate change mitigation and adaptation in farming, particularly for smallholder rice farmers through Agroecological Transitions. She realized that everyone could make a change, and she's striving to be a part of the change. Fatemeh holds an M.Sc. in Environmental Planning from the University of Tehran, Iran, and boasts diverse research experiences across interdisciplinary fields in countries such as South Korea, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Slovakia, and Ireland.
Doctoral Project: Improving the Sustainability of Food Production under Climate Change: Reinventing Agroecological Rice Farming in Iran
Fatemeh's project aims to model water scarcity and identify climate change hotspots for rice farms in Iran. It will utilize Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) (FAO, 2019) to evaluate agroecological systems globally in the pilot region. Moreover, Fatemeh will strategically focus on enhancing the capacities of smallholder rice farmers, particularly through farmer field schools and Farmer2Farmer learning networks.
Supervisor: Prof. Johanna Jacobi, Agroecological Transitions and Dr. Lutz Merbold, Agroscope
Read more about Fatemeh's project here.
Meet Jean Modeste Mushimiyimana
Jean Modeste Mushimiyimana is a passionate physicist and data scientist who recently served as a teaching assistant at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) Rwanda, specializing in these fields. He holds a bachelor's degree in Physics (Earth Science) from the University of Rwanda (UR), as well as two master’s degrees: one in Mathematical Science for Climate Resilience from AIMS-Rwanda, and another in Technical Physics from Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT), Finland. With a strong background in environmental data processing, analysis, and modelling, Modeste’s research interests primarily focus on environmental projects involving data analytics and modelling.
Doctoral Project: Development of an early warning modelling tool for a large lake affected by methane harvesting, volcanism, and climate change
Jean Modeste's project will develop a model for monitoring the combined effects of methane extraction, climate change, and volcanic activity on Lake Kivu. The 2,300 km2 lake straddles the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, and provides livelihoods to around 5.7 million people. Its high levels of dissolved gases pose threats of fatal eruption, but also offer economic opportunity for methane extraction. Since 2009, methane extraction on Lake Kivu has served the dual purpose of generating electricity and reducing the amount of dissolved gases in the lake to mitigate the risk of gas eruption, but there remains a need for stronger long-term monitoring to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the lake's changes.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Nicolas Gruber (ETH Department of Environmental Systems Science) Dr. Martin Schmid (Eawag)
Read more about Jean Modeste's project here.