Speakers

Professor Dickson Despommier (Columbia University, USA) 

Department of Environmental Health Sciences,   Director of the Vertical Farm Project.   Dickson Despommier is a leading scientist and pioneer of vertical farming. Dickson graduated with a MSc degree from Columbia University in 1964 and PhD from University of Notre Dame in 1967. He developed the concept of vertical farming out of a medical ecology course he taught in 1999. Articles about the subject have been published in The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Popular Science, Scientific America

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    • Joe Swartz (Hydroponic Consulting Services, USA) 

        Joe Swartz is the owner of Hydroponic Consulting Services and Swartz Family Farm in Amherst, MA, USA.   He is also the former Director of Farming for Sky Vegetables, which designs, builds, and operates rooftop hydroponic farms in urban areas.  Joe personally designed and oversaw the construction of the farm at Arbor house, which is the first commercial rooftop hydroponic farm in the United States to sit atop public housing, located in the Bronx, NY.  A portion of the production from this year-round, pesticide-free farm is distributed dir

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    • Dean Cook (Lead Technologist, TSB, UK) 

        Dean is Lead Technologist for Sustainable Agriculture and Food on the UK Technology Strategy Board (TSB)   With 24 years practical experience in research translation, he was formerly at Defra’s ‘Food and Environment Research Agency’ where his early career was as an applied biologist specialising in crop storage. In 2004 he joined the agency’s commercial management team, working in roles which included B2B relationship management and providing consultancy and research services to industry. In his most recent

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    • Jack Ng (Sky Greens vertical farm, Singapore) 

      Inventor and founder of the Sky Greens vertical farm, Singapore.   Jack Ng has over 28 years of experience in the construction and engineering industry.  Prior to the agriculture industry, he has consulted, designed and built houses, automated aluminum and glass systems for the construction industry.  In 2009, Jack applied his extensive knowledge from the construction industry and invented Singapore’s first vertical soil-based rotating farming system.

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    • Penney Poyzer (Nourish Associates, UK) 

        Penney Poyzer is joint managing director of Nourish Associates Ltd   Nourish Associates Ltd, is a female founded, socially focussed business addressing the nexus of food, energy and water. She and her business partner Shona Munro are champions of the local food movement.   Penney is a multi award winning environmentalist and with her husband architect Gil Scha

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    • Martin Perks (Mott MacDonald Ltd, UK) 

        Martin Perks is the acting Technology Operations Director at Mott MacDonald Ltd.   Since 2009 he has been actively developing  “off Grid” sustainable communities under the Good Earth Power PATHWAY Programme and coordinated the implementation of 17 technologies in challenging development environments. This programme of coordinated delivery of Power; Agriculture; Transportation; Telecoms’; housing for the empowerment of women and youth, is designed to improve community developm

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    • Anne-Cécile Daniel (INRA, France) 

        Anne-Cécile Daniel works in Paris for the urban agriculture team of INRA (french agronomic research institute) leaded by Christine Aubry.   Graduated since 2012 from a landscape and horticulture engineer school in Angers, she wants to combine these two competences to study and contribute to the urban agriculture development in Paris and its region.   During her last 6 months of internship she studied the food function in associative gardens in collaboration with P

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    • Tim Haworth (Cambridge HOK, UK) 

        Tim Haworth is general manager for Cambridge HOK, UK   Tim’s background is one long served in the Glasshouse Salad growing sector. He has worked directly with major UK retailers and has developed supplier bases for fresh produce from the southern Mediterranean, northern Africa and the Middle East.   Tim joined CambridgeHOK to bring technical growing expertise into a glasshouse engineering company which already has a high reputation within the UK and abroad.  

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    • Gus van der Feltz (Philips Horticulture, Netherlands) 

        Gus van der Feltz is Global Director City Farming in the Philips Horticulture LED solutions group.   Combining a background as a physicist complemented with an MBA, he has more than 15 years of experience in creating, developing and improving technology related businesses, by working at the crossroads of technology and business to bring innovation to market. He has worked both for multinational companies and as an entrepreneur, largely in the semiconductor equipment industry, and now leverages that background to lead Philips’ team develo

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    • Professor Qichang Yang (Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, China) 

      Director of the Research Centre for Protected Agriculture & Environmental Engineering (CPAE).   Professor Qichang Yang is a Chief Scientist and the Director of Key Lab of Energy Saving & Waste Management of Agricultural Structures, Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), China. He obtained his MS (1987) and PhD (1996) in Bio-Environment Engineering at China Agricultural University. As a visiting scholar, he studied greenhouse environment engineering in the System and Control group (SCO) at Wag

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  • Conference Venue

    The Exchange Building
    Wollaton Rd
    The University of Nottingham
    Jubilee Campus
    Nottingham, UK
    NG8 1BB
    Telephone: 0115 876 0900
  • Conference sponsors