Chris Barrett
Agricultural and development economist, Cornell University
Chris Barrett is an agricultural and development economist at Cornell University. He is the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and an International Professor of Agriculture at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, as well as a Professor in the Department of Economics, a Professor in the Department of Global Development, and a Fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. He is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Food Policy, edits the Palgrave Macmillan book series Agricultural Economics and Food Policy, co-edits the Elsevier Handbook of Agricultural Economics, volumes 5 and 6, and previously was editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, and the African Association of Agricultural Economists, and has won numerous university, national and international awards for teaching, research and policy outreach and public service. His more than 350 publications have been cited more than 43,000 times, placing him among the top five scholars globally in the agricultural economics, development economics, food security, poverty, and resource economics fields, according to Google Scholar, and well within the top 1 percent of all economists worldwide according to RePEc/IDEAS. He serves on a variety of boards and panels, including on the Independent Science and Development Council of the CGIAR and the elected Executive Board of the International Association of Agricultural Economics currently.
Innovations to Build Resilience in Low-Income Rural Communities: Some Research Reflections and Frontiers
Wednesday, June 30
CET 18:00 – 19:30
Caixia Gao
Principal Investigator of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), China
Caixia Gao is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining IGDB in 2009, she served as Research Scientist of DLF’s biotechnology group in Denmark, where she worked in plant genetic transformation and molecular biology. She completed her Ph.D. in Plant Genetics from China Agricultural University, Beijing. Her research group focuses on developing precision genome editing technologies and applying their use to create new agricultural crops of the future. Her team has published over 80 papers on plant genome editing in Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology and other journals. These papers have been widely cited by international science community with the total number of citations exceeding 10,000.
Gene Editing
Thursday, July 1
CET 13:00 – 14:00
Website Caixia Gao: http://enpcce.genetics.cas.cn/PN/CXG/ACXG/
Ramanan Laxminarayan
Founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP), Washington, D.C. and New Delhi
Laxminarayan is founder and director of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) in Washington, D.C. and New Delhi, and a senior research scholar at Princeton University. He is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland and at the University of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa. Laxminarayan chairs the board of GARDP, a global product development partnership created by the World Health Organization, that aims to develop and deliver new treatments for bacterial infections. He is founder and board chair at HealthCubed, which works to improve access to healthcare and diagnostics worldwide.
Since 1995, Laxminarayan has worked to improve the understanding of antibiotic resistance as a problem of managing a shared global resource. His work encompasses extensive peer-reviewed research, public outreach, and direct engagement across Asia and Africa through the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership. Through his prolific research, active public outreach (including a TED talk that has been viewed over a million times) and sustained policy engagement, he has played a central role in bringing the issue of drug resistance to the attention of leaders and policymakers worldwide and to the United Nations General Assembly in September 2016.
During the Obama Administration, Laxminarayan served on the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology’s antimicrobial resistance working group and was appointed a voting member of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance. He is a series editor of the Disease Control Priorities for Developing Countries, 3rd edition.
Laxminarayan currently leads the largest Covid-19 epidemiology study in the world based on extensive contact tracing in India. The flagship paper from this study was published in Science in 2020.
Laxminarayan et al (2020) Epidemiology and transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in two Indian states
Building Resilience to Future Pandemics
Wednesday, June 30
CET 13:00 – 14:00
Joachim von Braun
Director of the Center for Development Research (ZEF), Bonn University
Joachim von Braun is a Director of the Center for Development Research (ZEF), Bonn University, and Professor for economic and technological change. His research is on economic development, science and technology policy, poverty reduction, food and nutrition security, agriculture, resource economics and trade. He serves as Chair of the Scientific Group for the Food Systems Summit 2021 of the UN Secretary General. He initiated the Global Bioeconomy Summits and is Co-Chair of International Advisory Council on Global Bioeconomy. von Braun is President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican, member of various other academies. From 2002 to 2009, he was director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) based in Washington DC.
What Type Bioeconomy Supports Sustainable Development
Bioeconomy can play a key role for sustainable development, and the food systems’ sustainability in particular, but bioeconomy is not per se sustainable. The paper relates the fast bioeconomy evolution to drivers from science and innovation, to re-valuation of bio-resources, to demand side forces, and to theory of industrial clustering. The emerging patterns of locational advantages of bioeconomies, and causes of their dynamism are systematised. Scope for global cooperation among bioeconomy regional clusters is reflected. Public policy to facilitate bioeconomy’s effective contribution to sustainable development must establish framework conditions for continued technological and institutional innovations.