ENEA’s support to International Researcher Mobility has always been among the Agency’s priorities. Its commitment has been recently consolidated with the strong effort in the field of Development Cooperation. In the light of the above, the Agency has signed important Agreements with The World Academy of Sciences - TWAS (twas.org). TWAS works under the aegis of the United Nations and is specifically dedicated to encouraging research and technological development in developing countries, too. Based on the agreement, joint international fellowship programme have been started up with applications open to the international researchers community.

In this context, Lydie-Stella Koutika won a 9-month international fellow, after an accurate selection by specific Joint Committees, that will permit her to carry out her research activities in Biotechnology and Agro-industry Division - Sustainability, Quality and Safety of Agrifood productions Laboratory.

She is a soil scientist working at Research Center on Productivity and Sustainability of Industrial Plantations (CRDPI) in the Republic of the Congo. In 2014, she received the prestigious African Union Science Award for Scientific Excellence Programme - ‘African Union Kwame Nkrumah Regional Scientific Award for Women’.

Recently, Koutika has been awarded the TWAS-Fayzah M. Al-Kharafi Prize for her work exploring introducing new plant species to make the sandy soil of her home country more rich to create better-quality growing seasons for both farms and forests. This work is important to Congolese people in both the farms and the cities they feed as they develop their nation after the Republic of the Congo Civil War which ended in 1999. Koutika received the award at the 28th TWAS General Meeting in Trieste – Italy ( https://twas.org/article/solving-sandy-soil-puzzle), attended by more than 300 scientists, policy experts, journalists and others.

Her research focuses, also on soil organic matter (C, N and P) dynamics related to soil fertility and C sequestration in different ecosystems. This earned her a commentary on Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07587-4). Currently, she is working on soil fertility and C sequestration of nutrient-poor soils the Congolese coastal plains under the mixed-species plantations of acacia and eucalyptus by evaluating the dynamics of soil organic matter along with soil microbial community investigations at the ENEA Laboratory for  Sustainability, Quality and Safety of Agrifood productions Laboratory (Biotechnology and Agro-industry Division, Department for Sustainability) with the supervision of Annamaria Bevivino.