Anabelle Laurent Wins the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris’ “All Specialties” Science Thesis Prize

The Chancellerie des Universités de Paris awarded forty-one such prizes, which celebrate the academic and scientific excellence of Ph.D. theses defended during the calendar year. For the 2021 prize year, prize amounts ranged from €1,500 to €10,000 (all disciplines included).

Anabelle is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Iowa, where her thesis was jointly supervised between the United States and France (Agronomy UMR – AgroParisTech/INRAE/Paris-Saclay University, under the direction of David Makowski, director of research at INRAE). As a trained engineer, Anabelle Laurent has been particularly involved in the ABIES (Agriculture, Food, Biology, Environment, and Health) Doctoral School, where she took part in the ABIES 2019 days and in the seminar on jointly supervised Ph.D. theses organized in 2021 for AgroParisTech and the Biosphera Graduate School at Paris-Saclay University.

Combining skills in statistics, agronomy, and sociology, her thesis on “The Analysis of Data From On-Farm Research Networks: Statistical Approaches to Test the Efficacy of Management Practices and Data Visualization” includes advanced Bayesian statistical approaches and fieldwork conducted in contact with farmers. In addition to the scientific advances she has achieved and the four articles she has published, Anabelle has designed an online software tool named ISOFAST. Her approach is innovative—both in its methodology and in its applications—in France and in the United States.