Tina Engler wins a PhD scholarship from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg under the Saxony-Anhalt Graduate Development Programme. The award will help the young academic to complete her doctoral thesis project on 'Stochastic optimal control of investment models’ from October 2012 to September 2014. Her scientific work will analyse optimal investment strategies of an investor in the agricultural sector confronted by uncertainty regarding future developments, such as uncertain productivity, input and output prices. Such uncertainties will be modelled by means of discontinuous stochastic processes in order to map also empirically observed escalating price developments. She will use suitable mathematical methods to generate statements relating to optimal investment strategies. The academic supervisors of the PhD student are IAMO Director Alfons Balmann and Wilfried Grecksch, Professor at the Martin Luther University, Institute of Mathematics. Currently, Tina Engler is working at the IAMO until the end of September 2012 under a two-month IAMO scholarship.