12.12.2025
On Tuesday, 9 December 2025, we celebrated the successful defence of Jing Yu‘s dissertation in the seminar room of Potsdam’s Botanical Garden.
Under the eyes of her supervisors, Dr Ehsan Rezaei and Prof Claas Nendel, and her colleagues from Research Area 4, Jing Yu gave an excellent presentation of her work to the doctoral committee, subsequently defending it against profound questions from Prof Damaris Zurell of Potsdam University and Prof Wopke van der Werf of Wageningen University, among others. Jing Yu worked on representing a wheat-soybean intercropping system in an agroecosystem model, using it to investigate appropriate irrigation schedules and future yield expectations under climate scenarios. Thanks to her work, agronomists now have a better understanding of how wheat-soybean intercropping can be optimised further and which plant genetic properties could make this intercropping variant a viable addition to crop rotations in north-eastern Germany. We congratulate Dr Yu on her success and wish her all the best for her future career, which she will pursue at ZALF for at least another two years.
