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.

Mr. Maningo has extensive experience working in Cambodia, working mostly on monitoring an evaluation of natural resource management, agriculture, livelihoods, environment and development projects, and project design. His area of expertise includes conducting and designing baseline, mid-term and endline surveys, use of econometric tools and systems design modeling for impact assessment of development and livelihood projects, value chain analysis, spatial analysis/GIS, database management data analysis using statistical packages.

Biranchi Kumar Choudhury hold two Master degrees, one in Agriculture (Agronomy) and another in Sustainable Development (Climate Change). He is currently working in Cambodia and supporting the Ministry of Economy and Finance as Program Implementation Advisor to implement the Climate Resilient Rice Commercialization Sector Development Program (Rice-SDP) and the Ministry of Interior as International Project Coordination Specialist to implement Tonle Sap Small holder Development Project-Additional Financing (TSSD-AF).

Pankaj is the Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at GramHeet, which aims to increases smallholder farmers’ income by providing integrated post-harvest services through a digital platform. Earlier, Pankaj served for three years in the CSR department at Tata Steel, where he worked with tribal farmers to promote and strengthen their livelihoods. Pankaj holds a master’s degree in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, with a gold medal. Pankaj is an Acumen Fellow, Social Alpha Entrepreneurs for Impact Fellow.

Dr. Young-Tae Kim is Associate Vice President of the Institute for Startup KAIST. Before he joined KAIST, he was Director-General of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups in the Republic of Korea and He worked in the government for 20 years. He contributed with his specialty to improve the innovation in SMEs and establish a better environment to sustain SME's business. He studied at Seoul National University for his Bachelor’s degree and finished his doctoral degree in Soongsil University with Venture Financing study.