Meareg Hailemariam is a lecturer at DAUST, Senegal in the Faculty in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department. Previously, he was a faculty member of the Center of ITSC, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia for 3 years. He also worked as an iCog Labs based Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Programmer for Hanson Robotics. Currently, he is a core team member of the Climate Change AI initiative.
2021 Agriculture Technical Advisory Panel
We establish an independent Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) for each Request for Proposals (RFP). TAP members bring strong technical and domain knowledge, and are responsible for identifying data gaps, refining RFPs, and reviewing and selecting proposals for funding. They also outline insights from the funding process and make recommendations for future funding considerations.
Meareg Hailemariam
Dakar American University of Science and Technology
About Meareg Hailemariam
Zara Khan
Mineral
About Zara Khan
Zara Khan is a Business Development Manager at Mineral-X with expertise in remote sensing, smallholder and deep learning/ machine learning. She has been responsible for launching breakthrough robotics, sensing, and software tools to help farmers, breeders, agronomists, and scientists understand the complexity of the plant world. Zara worked with Planet Labs in San Francisco, CA for three years as the Business Development Director; Agriculture where she led partnerships focused on commercial satellite imagery, including pricing and licensing; and also conducted market sizing and identified target customer segments.
Ruthie Musker
Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (CABI)
About Ruthie Musker
Ruthie Musker is an expert in evidence-based agriculture, conservation, and data research with a demonstrated history of building partnerships, leading and managing complex and strategic projects, and delivering high-quality research outputs. She is a data policy and agricultural systems strategic leader with over eight years of experience in global agricultural perspectives on data management and sharing. She has robust experience in coordinating collaborative international research teams within and across continents, having covered India, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and the UK for example.
She currently serves as a project Officer – Data Policy & Practice at CABI organization where she focuses on Enabling Data Access and Sharing in Agricultural Development Programmes. At GODAN Secretariat, she had a role as Strategic Projects and Partnerships Lead where she was accountable for leading and managing expert teams of researchers to coordinate the regular release of deliverables related to GODAN’s mission of open data for food systems and was also responsible for strategizing for and initiating cutting-edge research within the field of agriculture, nutrition, and food systems. Ruthie also worked as a Sustainable Sourcing Program Representative at the Agricultural Sustainability Institute, UC Davis in 2016. She worked also with the Food Systems Center and Sustainable Agroecosystem at ETH Zurich, and the Agricultural Sustainability Institute and Information Center for the Environment at UC Davis on defining sets of issues and indicators to assess resilience along agricultural value chains.
Louise Donnison
University of Edinburgh
About Louise Donnison
Dr. Louise Donnison is a Senior Data Scientist, SEBI, University of Edinburgh since December 2016. She is responsible for the delivery and strategic direction of the data component of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded livestock project SEBI (Supporting evidence Based Interventions) based at Easter Bush Vet School. She co-leads with the Bayes Institute a DDI (Data-Driven Innovation) project to automate the extraction of data from livestock reports using Natural Language Processing and machine learning.
Dr. Donnison has a degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Oxford, a PhD in Grassland Soil Ecology from the University of Aberystwyth, and a diploma in Business Analysis from the British Computer Society. She leads the delivery of several data components of projects at Edinburgh University and is committed to delivering data solutions focused on stakeholder needs. She previously worked in the IT industry for over 10 years delivering complex projects in multiple sectors (finance, telecoms and government) and countries (mainly New Zealand, Canada and the USA). She was also a Technical Author at Harper Adams University, UK, in 2013 where she gathered and analyzed data to inform policy decisions for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and The Woodland Trust, engaging with stakeholders to define project scope for the production of a policy report to inform decision-making.
Drew Wheadon
Tetra Tech ARD
About Drew Wheadon
Drew Wheadon is an international project manager working at the intersection of ag-tech, advanced analytics, and their integration within dynamic market systems. He is an Associate, Agriculture and Economic Growth at Tetra Tech company since 2018 Burlington, Vermont Area and is currently a project manager at the Enabling Crop Analytics at Scale (ECAAS) Initiative. He currently leads another outstanding grant-making process with significantly related objectives but with a broader scope.
In October 2020, Drew participated as a technical reviewer to select a remote sensing and agricultural production provider as part of the AGRA’s Strengthening Agri-Foods Data Systems to Inform Food Security Policies and Trade in Sub-Saharan Africa initiative. Drew has also been coordinating with RCMRD and NASA Harvest to better understand the availability of public and private agricultural datasets which could help to inform the RFBS production module development.
Hamed Alemohammad
Radiant Earth Foundation
About Hamed Alemohammad
Hamed Alemohammad is the Executive Director and Chief Data Scientist at Radiant Earth Foundation, leading the development of Radiant MLHub – the open repository for geospatial training data and models. He has extensive expertise in machine learning, remote sensing and imagery techniques particularly in developing new algorithms for multi-spectral satellite and airborne based observations. Prior to joining Radiant Earth, he was a Research Scientist at Columbia University. Hamed received his PhD from MIT in 2014.