Sonal is Chair and Professor of Sustainable Management at the University of York. She specialises in sustainable operations and supply chain management practices along with technological adoptions for enhancing the resilience and sustainability of food systems. She investigates how different types of interventions can help in designing a sustainable and circular agri-food value chain. She has created a network of national and international stakeholders in food, energy and water industry that includes some of the big players, service providers, retailers, processors, SMEs, farmer organisations, NGOs, certification bodies and policy makers in the UK and beyond. She also leads project TRANSSITioN (£0.84M) which focuses on STFC technology and data science adoption for reducing food loss and waste while enhancing the livelihood of farmers in developing countries. She is currently co-leading two EU circular economy projects (~€4.5M) one of which focuses on agri-food (ProCEdS).
A Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, Sarah is author of over 100 refereed publications which have over 9000 citations and has won prestigious awards in the UK and Europe including a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, the Royal Astronomical Society’s Fowler Award, and European Research Council Starting and Consolidator Grants. Sarah has diversified from cosmology into agriculture and food research, motivated by the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2017, Sarah founded the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Food Network+, bringing together food research and industry with STFC capabilities from astro, particle and nuclear physics and the UK’s largest science facilities. Sarah led the Take a Bite out of Climate Change exhibit at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in 2019 and leads the Greenhouse Gas and Dietary choices Open source Toolkit (GGDOT) which brings together data from food choices and greenhouse gas emissions to inform the public and policy makers. Sarah’s book Food and climate change – without the hot air will be published in 2020 by UIT Cambridge.
Jadu is a Professor in Remote sensing in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton, UK. Prof. Dash, has a strong international reputation in mapping, monitoring and understanding terrestrial ecosystem processes using Earth observation data. In recognition of these contributions, the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the Russian Academy of Science awarded him the highly prestigious Zeldovich Medal. He works closely with the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellite programme and developed one of the operational satellite land product to estimate canopy chlorophyll content of vegetation. His group have pioneered novel space-time data analysis techniques to derive automatic information on crop phenological information, which is crucial for large scale monitoring of crop growth and in turn predicting yield. His team is leading the operational validation of Copernicus global vegetation products to ensure they meet the quality requirement for downstream application. He sits on various international scientific committees, including vice chair of COSPAR commission A3.1. Prof Dash has received research funding of over £7 million as PI/Co-I and published more than 80 papers.
Katherine is Academic Director of N8 AgriFood and holds overall responsibility for the development and management of the five-year, cross-institution programme.
Professor Denby works with N8 AgriFood’s core team at University of York, and with programme colleagues across the eight universities to promote collaboration in the AgriFood arena. She encourages new collaboration between research groups from different disciplines and looks to enhance engagement with the private sector along the AgriFood supply chain “from farm to fork”.
Prof Denby’s research is focused on understanding and enhancing plant disease resistance and she brings a wealth of international experience to the role. She has worked in the USA as well as South Africa, before returning to the UK ten years ago.
At Warwick University, as a member of the Warwick Systems Biology Centre, and more recently the Warwick Integrated Synthetic Biology Centre, Prof Denby has worked with mathematicians and engineers to generate novel biological insight and develop approaches to enhance plant breeding.
Bob Doherty is Professor of Marketing and Chair of Agrifood at the University of York and leads a 4-year interdisciplinary research programme on food resilience titled ‘IKnowFood’ (Global Food Security fund). Bob is also the research theme leader for food in the York Environmental Sustainability Research Institute (YESI). In addition, he has recently been seconded into UK Government Department, DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) as a senior policy fellow to work on Food Systems policy development. Bob is now also co-investigator on the STFC Food Network phase 2 programme of work. Bob specializes in research on the management aspects of social enterprise hybrid organizations competing in the food industry. He is currently a trustee on the board of the Fairtrade Foundation. Founding Editor Emeritus of the Social Enterprise Journal- after 10-years as Editor in Chief of the Social Enterprise Journal published by Emerald publishers. Prior to moving into academia Bob spent 5-years as the Head of Sales and Marketing at the Fairtrade social enterprise pioneer Divine Chocolate Ltd.
Nishikant is working as a Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management and Director of Sustainable Production and Consumption Research Centre at Hull University Business School, University of Hull, UK. Prior to that he worked as Director of Post Graduate Research at Norwich Business School, University of East Anglia, UK. He also worked as a Director of Research at Aberystwyth Business School, Aberystwyth University, UK. Nishikant is associated with several research projects funded by Innovate UK, BBSRC, EPSRC, GCRF, DEFRA, Rural development plan for Wales. Currently, he is also working as consultant with various companies on different projects. His research interest includes big data, supply chain modelling, circular economy, technology adaptation, case-based reasoning, multi-criteria decision analysis, modelling of uncertainty by fuzzy sets, meta-heuristics, hyper-heuristics and multi-agent systems. He is part of different scientific committee and session chair of several international conferences and has published about 50 papers in leading international journals and conferences.
Taff is highly active in analytical chemistry and the space technology translation agenda at The Open University. The first half of his career was spent developing instruments for the Rosetta and Beagle2 space missions. Having successfully analysed a comet, he has since led research teams to develop a wide range of bespoke, high impact, sector disruptive solutions to terrestrial challenges, including developing the award-winning air quality monitoring system for use on all future UK submarines and instruments for the world’s largest flavours and fragrance company. The STFC Food Network + has allowed him to work with end-users to develop novel sniffing solutions for: determining the shelf-life of rocket salad, identifying avocados damaged or infected with fungi and earlier detection of Campylobacter in chicken farms. In partnership with the Scotch Whisky Research Institute and IBM Research UK his team is developing methods to authenticate Scotch whisky and with funding from the Partnership for Clean Competition they are developing sports anti-doping screening tests. Taff is a Founder/Director of 4 start-up companies.
Stephen is Professor of Astronomy at the Open University. His research specialisms include star-forming galaxies, strong gravitational lensing, infrared astronomy and astronomical applications of machine learning. In the STFC Food Network+1.0 he served as Technology Champion, facilitating finding new applications of STFC technology for the food industry, including those that may address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At the time of writing (January 2020) Prof. Serjeant has written or co-written nearly 300 papers with over 14,000 citations and four books, and has also been a science consultant for several BBC television series, such as Bang Goes The Theory and the forthcoming BBC series The Universe. His first degree was from Bristol and his doctorate from Oxford, and he has worked at Imperial College and the University of Kent.
Prof. Serjeant writes: "I'm also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Chartered Physicist, meaning that I have three F-words and one C-word after my name, all well deserved. I wrote a paper with George Djorgovski, who wrote a paper with Jogesh Babu, who wrote a paper with Paul Erdös, giving me an Erdös number of no more than three. This is five less than Erwin Schrödinger. There's a lesson in there somewhere but for some reason I don't feel it's in my best interests to point it out."
Lee is a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Sheffield. He is head of the particle physics group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and is the Faculty of Science’s assistant faculty director for research and innovation. Lee also serves on the management board of STFC’s NuSec (nuclear security) network. Lee’s interest in SFN 2.0 arises from the possibility that particle physics techniques can be used in determining water scarcity. Specifically, it is possible to estimate the water content in the surface layers of the ground by observing cosmic ray neutrons. He is particularly interested in developing efficient low-cost instrumentation to make such measurements feasible in communities that do not otherwise have access to such data.
Liz is a senior lecturer in Human Nutrition and a UK registered nutritionist. Liz trained in Physiology and was awarded a PhD in nutrition in 1996. Her Postdoctoral research was with the MRC Dunn Nutrition Unit, Cambridge where she worked at a field station in The Gambia, West Africa. On her return to the UK she was appointed as a Lecturer in Human Nutrition at Newcastle University and moved to the University of Sheffield in 2003, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010. Her research focus is the role of diet in prevention of chronic disease and in healthy ageing. She has over 20 years of experience of conducting nutrition intervention trials and is also interested in the technology to support healthy behaviours. She is a member of two University of Sheffield flagship research institutes: The Institute for Sustainable Food and the Healthy Lifespan Institute.
Christian is recognised as a global expert on food loss and waste and sustainable diets. He was a Knowledge Exchange Research Fellow (N8 AgriFood project) at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, and a STFC Food network+ Champion.
