Ato Bart Plange

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Professor Ato Bart-Plange is a Professor of Agro Environmental Engineering in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Kumasi, Ghana.  He is currently the Head of Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering and Acting Vice Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering at KNUST.

He is a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Academic Fellow and recipient of the prestigious National Agricultural Research Project Innovative Award for his work on small ruminant housing improvement in Ghana in recognition of outstanding research contributions to the livestock sector. He joined KNUST as a lecturer in 1994 and rose through the ranks to become Professor in 2013. He has taught several Agricultural Engineering courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels and has supervised over twenty postgraduate theses at the masters ans PhD levels. His strength is in biomaterial properties and their application to postharvest engineering processes, environmental management of agricultural systems, and agricultural structures. He is the developer of a small holder dairy milking stand and software for selection of engineering properties of Ghanaian food grains and seeds.

He has over 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and most of his articles are published in international journals. Several of his publications have been downloaded, read, and cited in various articles by researchers all over the world. As a capacity building expert in Agricultural Structures, Agro-Environmental Control, and Food and Postharvest Engineering for the past 20 years, he has led various funded projects in KNUST. He has been a member of several statutory committees of the University including the Academic Board, Executive Committee, Central Admissions Committee, University Library Committee, College Board, and Student Financial Services Board. He was a visiting fellow at the Department of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Cape Coast in 2011-2013. He was an external examiner for the University of Cape Coast (2013-2015) and University for Development Studies (2007-2009) and he has been an assessor for staff promotions for several universities in Ghana. He has also been a reviewer for several local and international journals.

He has extensive international experience, including a DAAD academic visit to the University of Kassel, Germany in 1997 and a visiting resource person at a climate change conference in Denmark in 2006 where he presented a number of our environmental projects at KNUST that contribute to global environment and sanitation solutions. He holds membership of four professional associations including the Ghana Institution of Engineers, the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, the West African Society of Agricultural Engineering, and the Ghana Society of Agricultural Engineers.