Prof. Manuel Pérez Ruiz

• Universidad de Sevilla (Spain)

I began my research activity in 2001 in the framework of precision agriculture activities as part of the research group led by Dr. Josse De Baerdemaeker (KULeuven-Dept. of Biosystems) in Belgium. For more than 20 years, I have been working continuously on topics related to sensors and instrumentation for agricultural machinery, GNSS, variable application techniques, analysis of spectral and thermal information, and intelligent systems for the control of weeds. I maintain a close collaboration with the Univ. of California, Davis (USA), where I carried out six stays with a total duration of two years between 2008 and 2014. Here, together with Dr. D. Slaughter, I continue training and participating in various research projects and publications. Also, in a European context, I have extended effective collaborations with stays at the Univ. of Florence (Italy-2015) and the Univ. of Ghent (Belgium-2019). I am currently in charge of the “Smart Biosystems Laboratory” research group composed of 15 members.

I have participated in 20 research projects (3 European, 11 national, and 6 regionals), four of which I was the principal investigator. I have been a researcher in the European project, “Robot Fleet for High and Effective Agriculture and Forestry Management” with a budget of 6.5 M€. At the national level, I have been the principal investigator of the projects AGL2013-46343-R and AGL2016-78964-R. While at the regional level, I have been the principal investigator of the projects of excellence P12-AGR-1227 and US-1263678, both focused on precision agriculture and phenotyping techniques. I have published more than 90 papers, whereas 42 are articles indexed in the JCR, Science Edition (75% in Q1; and two of them were recognized by the “EurAgEng Outstanding Paper Awards” in 2014 and 2016) and I have achieved an h-index of 17. I have presented more than 70 conference papers and given ten lectures where I was invited as a special guest. Other indicators of the quality of scientific productions include 2 positive research evaluations (2006-11; 2012-17), 1 positive transfer evaluation (2004-2014), 4 completed theses supervised, and 4 in progress.