Dr. Serge Kotchi

Dr Serge Olivier Kotchi is the Director of the Agriculture, Geographic Information and Digital Technology Division at the National Bureau of Technical Studies and Development (Bureau National d’Etudes Techniques et de Développement, BNETD), Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, since 2023. He works with his teams on structuring projects to support the development of Côte d'Ivoire in the fields of Agriculture, Geographic Information and Digital Technology. Some major projects that they are working on are the development of regional agro-industrial hubs, studies for the construction of hydro-agricultural dams and the development of agricultural land, the reinforcement of rural land security, the development of the topographic map of Côte d'Ivoire at a scale of 1/50,000, the production of the land use map of Côte d'Ivoire, reference year 2020, to support the national sustainable cocoa strategy, the development of the national forest monitoring system, and the construction of the national datacenter of Côte d'Ivoire.

He was a Medical Geographer with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) from 2009 to 2022. His work at PHAC focused on risk modelling and mapping of climate-related emerging infectious diseases informed by Earth observation-based environmental determinant indicators. He participated in the training and co-directed the research work of several students as an associate professor in geomatics and remote sensing at universities in Canada and Côte d'Ivoire including Université Laval (2016 to 2023), Université de Sherbrooke (2016 to 2019) and Université Virtuelle de Côte d'Ivoire (since 2021). He is the author and co-author of several scientific publications and communications in the fields of agricultural geomatics, precision agriculture, public health, tele-epidemiology and earth observation. He is a member of the editorial board and reviewer for several scientific journals.

Dr Kotchi received the B.Sc. degree in land surveying from Institut National Polytechnique Félix Houphouët-Boigny (INP-HB), Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, in 2000, the M.Sc. degree in Geomatics from Université Laval, Quebec City, QC, Canada, in 2006, and the PhD degree in Geographical Sciences from the same university in 2015.