Institutional appointments: Pietro Tonutti, full professor of General Arboriculture and Tree Crops, has been elected director of the Institute of Crop Science of the Sant'Anna School; he will serve until June 3, 2027
Pietro Tonutti, full professor of General Arboriculture and Tree Crops is the new director of the Institute of Crop Science of the Sant'Anna School. Pietro Tonutti received best wishes and congratulations from the entire academic community.
“I am honored to be appointed as the first director of the new Institute of Crop Science. The work I intend to carry out over the three-year period will focus on developing strategies for the development and visibility of the various research groups and creating conditions for strong and qualified scientific collaboration of the Institute's researchers and faculty within and outside the School.”
Pietro Tonutti's research interests are on the topics of control of vegetative to productive activity of fruit plants, effects of agronomic practices and abiotic stresses in fruit production, development, physiology of fruit ripening and post-harvest, evaluation of quality and composition of fruit products, also in relation to their processing, through integrated analysis.
Pietro Tonutti, as a full professor at Sant'Anna School, has coordinated the Horticultural Science and Postharvest Area of the Crop Science Research Center for the past two years, and previously the Postharvest Physiology and Quality of Fruit Products Laboratory of the Institute of Life Sciences. Coordinator of the Crop Science Research Center for the two-year experimental period, he was also Director of the Research Division for three years, and the Dean's Delegate for International Relations for a long period while also serving in that capacity as Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Confucius Institute of Pisa.
Several international experiences have seen him as a Visiting Scientist at the Department of Vegetable Crops, University of California, Davis; the Department of Biological Science, University of California, Santa Barbara; and the Department of Horticulture, Oregon State University, Corvallis. He has also been inoltra Visiting Professor at the University of Western, Sydney, and has collaborated for several years with the teaching activities of the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute in Chania, Crete. He is Director of the Level I Master's Degree “Italian Wines and World Markets”, activated (with nine consecutive editions) at the Sant'Anna School.
Pietro Tonutti has gained experience in the acquisition and management of numerous scientific projects, contributing to the production, as lead author or co-author, of more than 150 technical-scientific articles and book chapters within the scope of the different research topics addressed. He was a founding member of the Working Group in Postharvest of the Italian Society of Horticulture (SOI). Elected Chair of the Quality and Postharvest Horticulture Commission of the Interational Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS), he held this position for 4 years. For the past ten years he has served as Associate Editor of the scientific journal Postharvest Biology and Technology.
