A postdoctoral scholar at WRRC, Lionel Benoit has accepted a position as a research scientist in his native France, at the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE).
INRAE was formed on 1 January 2020 with the merger of the National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) and the National Research Institute of Science and Technology for the Environment and Agriculture (IRSTEA). These respected and well-known institutions combined their research and considerable infrastructures (e.g., observatories, technical platforms, data repositories) to address a variety of issues such as the emergence of sustainable agricultural and food production systems throughout the world.
Lionel will begin his new position on 1 September 2021. At INRAE, he will be combining sensor network observations, geostatistics, and applications to hydro-meteorology to better estimate the water resources of the vadose zone (i.e., from the top of the ground surface to the water table) and their impact on agriculture. For now, Lionel will continue to collaborate with WRRC in his Hawai‘i-based research.