A rising star lights up in our sky
AGRO’s network now also includes one of president Macron's select foreign climate scientists; the young research talent Lorie Hamelin has been chosen as one of the few for the French ”Make Our Planet Great Again” initiative.
As the saying goes, you are at the most six handshakes away from everyone else in the world. AGRO has recently become just two handshakes away from France's president Emmanuel Macron via our contact with the young research talent within climate and bioeconomy, Lorie Hamelin. She is one of the only 18 researchers selected for Macron's initiative ”Make Our Planet Great Again”, to which more than 1800 researches showed interest. Of these, 90 were invited to send an applicaton in collaboration with a French institution, 57 applications were received, and voilá – among these 18 were selected to share the approximately 30 million euros that the research programme offers.
The 35-year-old Lorie Hamelin is a veritable rising star in the research sky. Originally from Canada, she earnd her bachelor and master degrees from Laval University in Québec, after which she came to Denmark to carry out her PhD studies within environmental technology. She defended her thesis “Carbon management and environmental consequences of agricultural biomass in a Danish renewable energy strategy” at University of Southern Denmark in March 2013.
In the course of her PhD studies with associate professor Henrik Wenzel at the University of Southern Denmark, she established contact with several researchers from the Department of Agroecology. One of these is senior researcher Uffe Jørgensen, KLIMA.
- Our cooperation with Lorie, who needed our knowledge of agroecology, was very fruitful. Among others, Jørgen E. Olesen and I collaborated with Lorie on one of the articles for her PhD, and that article is now highly cited, says Uffe Jørgensen.
The next rungs on Lorie Hamelin's career ladder were a postdoc and then an assistant professorship at the University of Southern Denmark. She was thereafter employed as a senior scientist at the EU-funded Department of Bioeconomy and System Analysis at the Institute of Soil Science and Plant Cultivation in Poland. Now the rising star is settling in in Toulouse, where she will work at the Biological Systems and Processes Engineering Laboratory (INRA). With Macron's climate funds she will establish and lead a group regarding bioeconomy in the project CambioSCOP (CArbon Management and BIOresources strategies for SCOPing the transition towards low fossil carbon).
That Lorie Hamelin is sitting in southern France is no obstacle for AGRO's continuing collaboration with her.
- With funds from the Centre for Circular Bioeconomy (CBIO) we have employed her for three months to participate in publications about bioeconomy and potential Danish biomass resources, but in the future we also expect a more binding collaboration with her new group, says Uffe Jørgensen.
Lorie's areas of expertise include bioeconomy, carbon management and life cycle assessments of various systems, particularly biosystems. She has a broad network in research in bioenergy, land use changes, and agroecology, so her research profile fits like a glove with a continued collaboration with AGRO and CBIO.
Read the article in Science ”French president’s climate talent search nabs 18 foreign scientists”