Keynote Speaker Biographies
Professor Yadvinder Malhi
Yadvinder Malhi is Professor of Ecosystem Science at the School of Geography and the Environment and Programme Leader of the Ecosystems Group at the Environmental Change Institute. His research interests focus on interactions between tropical ecosystems and the global atmosphere, with a particular focus on their role in global carbon, energy and water cycles, and in understanding how the ecology of natural ecosystems may be shifting in response to global atmospheric change. Yadvinder has a particular interest in the combination the diverse disciplines of ecological and forest field surveys, micrometeorological field techniques, satellite remote sensing, global atmospheric data, and vegetation-atmosphere modelling.
Dr Philip Thornton
Dr Philip Thornton is based in Edinburgh, UK and works with the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya, and the University of Edinburgh. His activities embrace systems characterisation and analysis, ex post and ex ante impact assessment, a wide variety of systems modelling, poverty mapping, and vulnerability assessment. He completed a BSc degree at the University of Reading, UK in 1979, specialising in agricultural systems. Dr Thornton earned his PhD degree, that involved the interface between biophysical and socio-economic models, a general area that has been a major interest ever since, in farm management (1983) from Lincoln College, New Zealand. He spent three years as a Post-Doc at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, working on bioeconomic modelling of livestock production systems in Latin America, and then three years based at the University of Edinburgh on crop and household modelling projects in Central America and southern Africa. In 1990, he joined the International Fertilizer Development Center in Alabama, and was involved in projects in various countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. He started with ILRI-Nairobi in 1996. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Soils Management Collaborative Research Support Program (CRSP) and of the International Consortium for Agricultural Systems Applications (ICASA), and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Agricultural Systems. In the SLP, Dr Thornton led work on poverty mapping and impact assessment of maize improvement. He is currently involved in the development of a framework to assess ex-ante the impact of improving feed resources in crop–livestock systems.
Pier Vellinga
Velllinga is the chairman of the Knowledge for Climate research program and vice chairman of the Climate Changes Spatial Planning program. These programs supports the Netherlands government and companies with operational knowledge required for investment decisions related to climate change adaptation and mitigation. He has a chair on climate and water in Wageningen University (WUR) and is director of the Wageningen University climate program and has a part time chair on sociatal impacts of climate change at the Institute of Environmental Studies of the VU University Amsterdam.