Dr. Martin Gooch is the co-founder and CEO of Value Chain Management International, a global consulting company that helps businesses in the agricultural and food industry enhance their long-term profitability and sustainability. He has considerable international experience developing commercially successful value chain initiatives that have received domestic and international acclaim. Martin holds a PhD in agri-business and a Master's degree in agri-food management and was appointed Adjunct Professor at the College of Business and Economics University of Guelph in 2013. Two decades of analyzing businesses and value chains to identify where food and related waste occurs and why culminated in Martin co-authoring several reports, including the 2014 paper which reports that Canada throws out $31 billion in perfectly edible food each year. Here's a video clip from his presentation at the 2015 Zero Waste Conference. 

 Dr. Mike von Massow is an Associate Professor at the College of Business and Economics at the University of Guelph and is an active member of the Guelph Food Waste Research Project. Mike's research focuses on the structure and performance of food value chains as they evolve in response to changing consumer preferences and other factors. As a frequent blogger with a strong presence on various forms of media, Mike is often contributing to the University of Guelph's on-going efforts in research extension and informing public policy and private strategy. Mike has recently been appointed the OAC Chair in Food System Leadership at the University of Guelph. Recently Mike spoke at the Guelph Talks Food. Check out this video clip!

Dr. Edward Spang is an assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology and also serves as the Associate Director of the center for Water-Energy Efficiency at UC Davis. Professor Spang is interested in researching the interconnections between food-energy-water systems with a specific emphasis on identifying opportunities to improve the efficiency in the delivery and use of these critical resources. His current work at UC Davis involves estimating and valuing the electricity and greenhouse gas savings linked to water conservation programs, as well as the water and energy savings achieved by reducing food losses and waste. He is also pursuing research on community-scale energy production from food waste with a focus on decentralized anaerobic digestion systems. 

Dr. Mike Dixon is a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences and is the Director of the Controlled Environment Systems Research Facility (CESRF), University of Guelph. He served as Chair of the Department of Environmental Biology from 2003-2008. As the project leader for the Canadian research team investigating the contributions of plants to life support in space, Dr. Dixon formed the Space and Advanced Life Support Agriculture (SALSA) program at the University of Guelph. This program currently represents Canada’s prime contribution to the international space science objectives in life support and collaborates with NASA and the Canadian and European Space Agencies. The CESRF is among the world’s leading research venues for technology developments and research dedicated to studying plant and microbial interactions in advanced life support systems. The technical “pull” of space exploration has aided the development of a wide range of technologies that have spun off into applications in terrestrial agri-food sectors and most notably the phyto-pharmaceutical (medicine from plants) sector in recent years. Dr. Dixon is also the project leader for the research team investigating the biofiltration of indoor air as a method of alleviating what is commonly known as “sick building syndrome”. You can virtually meet Dr. Dixon by checking out this video!

The 2018 Guelph Plant Sciences Symposium is a part of the Plant Sciences Symposium series, funded by: