Prof. Francis Kumi is an academic, researcher, and Professional Engineer with considerable expertise in agricultural mechanisation, machinery systems, sustainable engineering, and technology development. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, where he currently serves as Head of the Department of Agricultural and Mechanical Engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Mechanization Engineering from Jiangsu University, China, and is a Professional Engineer with the Ghana Institution of Engineering. He also serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, contributing to scholarly publishing, peer review, and the advancement of engineering research. Prof. Kumi’s research interests span agricultural machinery design and performance evaluation, farm mechanisation, tillage systems, soil–machine interactions, irrigation engineering, precision and intelligent agriculture, crop-processing technologies, renewable-energy applications in agriculture, and sustainable engineering solutions for smallholder farming systems. He has authored and co-authored more than 50 scholarly publications in peer-reviewed journals, with his work attracting growing international visibility and citations. His publications address important engineering and agricultural challenges, including machinery development, mechanisation systems, tillage and crop performance, irrigation technologies, automated transplanting, crop-residue management, postharvest engineering, and sustainable agricultural production.

Yves Kwibuka is a phytopathologist specializing in plant viral diseases. He is affiliated with the Terra Research Center at the University of Liège, where he conducted, over five years, his doctoral research under the supervision of Professor Sébastien Massart. His work focused on a metagenomic and epidemiological study of the cassava virome. He has developed expertise in molecular diagnostics of plant diseases, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. His research particularly involves high-throughput sequencing (next-generation sequencing) and the analysis of sequencing data for virus discovery and characterization. As part of his postdoctoral specialization, he led a research project on the socio-economic and ecological impacts of agroforestry systems. He is currently a researcher and lecturer in phytopathology at the Catholic University of Bukavu, within the Faculty of Agronomy and the Phytopathology Laboratory. He is also a member of the Center for Tropical Diseases and Global Health (CTDGH), where he contributes to molecular research and bioinformatics.