Biographies
Here you can find more information about our invited speakers.
Vincenzina Caputo
Vincenzina Caputo is a Professor and the Homer Nowlin Endowed Chair in Consumer and Food Economics at Michigan State University. She develops and uses cutting-edge methods to understand how people make food choices and how these choices impact the food system, supply chains, and policy. Her research informs food companies, farmers, processors, and policymakers, while also contributing to the academic literature and debate. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and by the private industry including the FMI, The Food Industry Association, Farm Foundation, and commodity groups. She provides expert analyses on emerging consumption trends and new market opportunities and has published over 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, European Review of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and Food Policy. She is an editor-in-chief of the European Review of Agricultural Economics, a board member of the AAEA, and co-founder of the Survey Design & Experimental Methods in Applied and Agricultural Economics workshop.
Matty Demont
Matty Demont (PhD) is a Principal Scientist Market & Food Systems Research leading the Inclusive Markets & Value Chains Unit at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. As the Lead of the CGIAR Initiative on Market Intelligence, he oversees a global research portfolio on market intelligence aiming at maximizing investment returns in genetic innovation through more market-driven and inclusive product design. He previously pioneered policy research on the modernization of African rice value chains at the Africa Rice Center in Senegal (2007–2013). He has more than 20 years of experience leading research on food system transformation throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. He acquired vast field experience through numerous surveys, value chain analyses, and behavioral experiments with consumers, farmers, food companies, and breeders. In 2012, his work was awarded the Louis Malassis International Scientific Prize by Agropolis Fondation, France, and the T.W. Schultz Award by the International Association of Agricultural Economists. He conducted his PhD and postdoctoral research on European biotechnology policy at KU Leuven, Belgium (1999–2007). He serves as an Editorial Board member of Global Food Security and has published widely in refereed journals, books and magazines and is a regular speaker at international conferences.
Anna Dreber
Anna Dreber is the Johan Björkman professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research is mainly in behavioral economics and metascience, exploring the replicability and generalizability of scientific results. Anna will discuss several large replication projects in mainly psychology and economics, where they redo experiments in high impact journals with new and larger samples. She will also cover studies on prediction markets in science, as well as recent work on multi-analyst projects and conceptual replications where researchers are asked to test the same hypotheses on the same data or to design experiments testing the same hypothesis. Anna is an editor at the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, a journal that encourages replications and pre-analysis plans and has a Registered Reports track.
Eric Lambin
Eric Lambin, a geographer and environmental scientist, divides his time between University of Louvain and Stanford University. His research tries to better understand the causes and impacts of land use changes in different parts of the world. Over the past ten years, his main research focus was on land use governance to reverse tropical deforestation. His recent ERC project analyses the land use implications of the renewable energy transition. He was awarded the 2014 Volvo Environment Prize and 2019 Blue Planet Prize. He published several broad audience books, including “An Ecology of Happiness” (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He is member of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission.
Elizabeth Robinson
Elizabeth is Professor of Environmental Economics in the Department of Geography and Environment, and is currently Acting Dean of the London School of Economics’ new Global School of Sustainability, seconded from her role as Director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. She works primarily on climate change and health, with a focus on food security and undernutrition, and heat and worker rights. She was on the UK Defra Economic Advisory Panel for five years; was Specialist Advisor to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Food, Poverty, Health, and Environment; working group one lead for the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change from 2016 to 2024; and is currently Chair of the Economics Advisory Group for CCRA4 for the UK’s Climate Change Committee, and on the Scientific Committee of the Regenerative Society Foundation.