Sangjun helps leverage the Republic of Korea’s agricultural and rural development experience in ADB projects. Prior to his current role, he has worked for the Korean Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs for ten years.

He has a bachelor’s degree from Seoul National University and a master's degree from the University of Birmingham. 

Digital Transformation and Innovation Expert in DeepTech related to agriculture, climate change, and sustainability. Driven to solve problems through scientifically-grounded innovations. He is an expert in understanding and digitally solving agricultural issues in the developed and developing world. Experienced in Policy/ project design on digital agriculture at scale. Consulted for Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)., UNIDO, WB, and WEF. A fan of science, collaboration, and customer experience.

Mr. Cao Đức Phát is currently a Member of the Central Council for Theoretic Studies, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of Vietnam Agriculture University, and Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees of the International Rice Research Institute.

From 2016 to 2021, he was the Permanent Deputy Chair of the Central Economic Commission after having served as Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of Vietnam from 2004 to 2016. In 2003, he was Deputy Secretary of An Giang Provincial Committee of CPV.

Currently, Vikash is the Founder - C.E.O of RuKart. He founded RuKart along with two other IIT Bombay alums in 2019. Mr. Jha did M.Tech in Technology & Development from CTARA at IIT Bombay. During his masters program, he has shown interest in developing scalable green technologies for small plot holders. This led to grant support from IIT Bombay after completing his M.Tech. He & his team developed technologies like Subjee Cooler and Peek-Rakshak in a participatory approach where the end-users were an integral part of the design team.

Kazuko joined ADB as nutrition specialist. Before taking this position, she worked for Japanese food manufacturer, Ajinomoto, and has a wide range of experience from R&D to scientific communication in nutrition field. She has Ph.D in chemistry from Osaka University, Japan.

Ede Ijjasz has more than 30 years of senior technical and management experience at the World Bank, academia, and consulting. His expertise is in the areas of finance, infrastructure, global environment, sustainable development, cities, water resources, climate change, agriculture, blue economy, resilience, fragility and conflict, resettlement, PPPs, and ESG.

Emma Quicho has more than 20 years of work experience focused on agricultural research. She started working with maize and, for the past 17 years, on rice-based ecosystems. Mrs. Quicho had the opportunity to characterize the different upland maize production systems in 24 locations across eight maize-growing regions in the Philippines under a CIMMYT project in 2001-2004. She was engaged in outscaling water-saving technologies for rice production in Asia by coordinating its dissemination and implementation with NARES partners.

Ren Avell Flores is a Geospatial Machine Learning Researcher at Thinking Machines Data Science, Inc. Working on projects for humanitarian aid, agriculture, and environmental conservation, she specializes in GIS and remote sensing applications. She has also co-authored three research papers in the fields of machine learning, open-source data, and meteorology. Ren Avell previously worked at the national weather bureau of the Philippines and is completing her masters in Geomatics Engineering at the University of the Philippines.