Profile
Laura Atuah is an associate professor at the Department of Horticulture, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana. She joined the Department in 2000. She is an innovative and creative Horticulturist and soil scientist with extensive experience in teaching, training, research, and consulting in horticulture. She has undergone several scientific and professional training programmes, such as training in innovative research under a professional capacity-building programme in Agricultural Research for Development (2005) in Wageningen, the Netherlands. She has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and has been involved in several. She also has training in Greenhouse management with extensive tours of greenhouses in Israel. She is keen on promoting protected cropping in Ghana, best nursery practices, formulation of soilless media for use in Horticulture (suitable for greenhouse production), and the use of organic amendments (compost and biochar) for remediation purposes in landscape and in food production. Her passion is to use her knowledge in in situ soil remediation to support the mining and industrial sector to regain the use of natural land for purposes including food production. With her wide professional experience in agriculture, she co-ordinated the Ornamental Research Programme under a national programme dubbed Agricultural Services Sub-sector Investment Project (AgSSIP), Ghana (2001-2007). She further worked with a team of scientists to undertake national projects such as the construction of the Baba Yara football pitch for CAN 2008. Currently, she is working on a Touton-funded project as a continuation of an ended GCRF project titled Remediation of Cocoa Soils in Ghana as a Route to more Sustainable Cocoa Production. Additionally, a Hershey-funded project titled “Use of Soil Amendments to Improve Establishment and Early Performance of Cocoa” in collaboration with the Cocoa Research Institute Ghana and the University of Reading, UK is also ongoing. Dr. Laura Atuah obtained her PhD in Soil Science (Dec 2010) from the University of Reading, United Kingdom, after obtaining an MPhil in Horticulture (2000) also from the same University. Her first degree was in Agriculture (1994) from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.
