Alireza Pourreza, a newly appointed UC Cooperative Extension agricultural engineering advisor at Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension center, has been awarded the 2016 Giuseppe Pellizzi Prize by the Club of Bologna, an honor presented every other year to the best doctoral dissertations focused on agricultural machinery and mechanization. The Club of Bologna is a world taskforce on strategies for the development of agricultural mechanization.
Pourreza, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of Florida in 2014, worked on early detection of Huanglongbing (HLB) disease of citrus. HLB, an incurable disease that is spread by Asian citrus psyllid (ACP), has seriously impacted citrus production in Florida. The disease has been found in commercial and residential sites in all counties with commercial citrus. Read more.
