Dr. Hao Gan has produced an excellent Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Florida under the direction of Dr. Won Suk “Daniel” Lee. When he started his PhD, Hao noticed that yield mapping of specialty crops had been a very difficult problem to address and that most research focused on only one aspect of a yield mapping system, such as fruit detection and autonomous navigation. Hao wanted to do something for the orange growers, helping them better asses their crop yield, determining early on in the season the amount of fruit that can be expected.  Moreover, yield mapping earlier in the season allows for crop production management decisions to be optimized and better planning of harvesting and marketing. However for yield mapping to reliably occur, a considerable obstacle had to be overcome: differentiating between leaves and immature citrus fruit, which both displayed similar colors, excluding the use of traditional color vision systems. Hao created a novel active thermal imaging method that used a water mist to induce temperature differences between fruit and leaves within a five second time period and then followed up with imaging using a thermal camera. He then incorporated the thermal camera with color cameras to significantly improve the accuracy of fruit detection. Finally, he combined this imaging system with an autonomous robot with a navigation system that he developed.  This work won him the 2020 Giuseppe Pellizzi Prize, which is a biennal international prize that recognizes the best PhD thesis on Agricultural Mechanization in the world https://www.clubofbologna.org/en/. In addition to Dr. Gan, the 2020 Giuseppe Pellizzi Prize finalists were: Dr. Christian Birkmann (Germany), Dr. Rajesh Modi (India) and Dr. Xin Zhang (USA). Being a finalist for the Giuseppe Pellizzi Prize is a great start to securing an international reputation. The finalists will be invited to Italy to attend, as guest experts, the Club of Bologna Full Member meetings from 2021 to 2025. The Club of Bologna is a world task-force focusing on strategies for the development of agricultural mechanization. Dr. Hao Gan is faculty in the Department Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science at the University of Tennessee since August 2019, where he is leading an exciting research group devoted to agricultural robots and machine vision. He is currently directing undergraduate and graduate students as well as a postdoct. Dr. Gan is leading projects on robotic and camera systems to help bees, newts, and poultry. Heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Gan and the three other finalists!!!