Heitor Cantarella

Heitor Cantarella is a Soil Scientist with a Ph.D. degree in Soil Fertility from Iowa State University, USA. He is the Deputy General Director of the Agronomic Institute of Campinas and head of the Soils and Environmental Research Center at the Agronomic Institute of Campinas. He is co-editor of the Fertilizer and Liming Recommendation Guidelines of the State of São Paulo. He has published more than 180 journal articles, in peer-reviewed journals, in addition to books and book chapters, technical recommendations, and dissemination articles in magazines. His current research projects involve crops for renewable energy production, fertilizer use efficiency, environmental impacts, and greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizers and residues. Among recent professional recognitions are the Heroes of the Brazilian Green Revolution (2015), IPNI Award on Plant Nutrition (2016) and IFA’s Norman Borlaug Award (2017), Medal A.B. Fagundes 2018 Presidential Award at the 21st World Congress of Soil Science (2018), and the Legend of Plant Nutrition (Yara, 2019). In his 46-year career as a researcher at IAC, he worked in soil science, soil fertility, and plant nutrition with various crops. He worked in several areas but concentrated on nitrogen, nutrient use efficiency, and nutrient losses, including NH3 volatilization. More recently, he became involved with research about N2O and other greenhouse gas effluxes associated with using fertilizers and agricultural by-products, environmental questions, and bioenergy in general. He is frequently invited to give lectures on these topics both locally as well as abroad. As his list of publications indicates, he has had partners in many organizations and institutions in Brazil and abroad, especially in the Netherlands, UK, and United States, and in a few other countries. He has led research projects with private as well as government funds. He received grants from most funding agencies in Brazil and many of them in international partnerships, especially with NWO in the Netherlands and BBSRC-Newton Fund in the UK, including thematic projects from FAPESP. He has oriented students in IC, MS, and Ph.D. programs and supervised several post-docs. His students have had the opportunity to do part of their research in several countries thanks to those partnerships. Presently, he teaches and supervises students in the Graduate Program at the Agronomic Institute of Campinas. He has served in administrative positions and boards at his institution and others. He was a member of the Coordination of the FAPESP Bioenergy Program (BIOEN) from 2009 to 2022, where he served as the agriculture member of the team. In this position, he helped with the research program, organized workshops and conferences (4 editions of BBEST – Brazilian Bioenergy Science and Technology International Conference), and is a project leader at the International Energy Agency – Bioenergy on sustainability. Presently, he is a counselor at the Nutrients for Life Initiative. Among other things, he served as President of the Council of the Foundation of Support to Agricultural Research (FUNDAG) in Campinas.