Dr. Jeffrey Coull is the Head of Strategic Initiatives and Projects at the Weston Family Foundation in Toronto. One of the strategic initiatives he leads is the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, which provides funding of up to $33M over six years and asks innovators to “create and deliver a market-ready system to reliably, sustainably and competitively produce berries out of season and at scale in Canada.

Dr. Coull will discuss the program at the conference and participate in a Q&A session to provide all necessary information for teams to prepare high-quality proposals. In particular, he will stress that prior experience with berry production is not necessary!

Dr. Zoë Migicovsky is an Assistant Professor in Biology at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where her research focuses on woody perennial fruit crops and their wild relatives. She graduated with a PhD in Biology from Dalhousie University before working as a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Agriculture. Her postdoctoral research involved studying graft-transmissible effects of rootstocks on grapevine shoots, which has important applications for crop improvement. In grapevine, her work uses diverse and multidimensional methods to measure trait variation in grafted plants including viticulturally important traits, vine physiology, mineral composition, leaf shape, and gene expression.   

Dr. Migicovsky will discuss the effect of root systems on shoot system traits across years including vine growth, yield, physiology, wood anatomy, and wine volatiles.

Gustavo A. Lobos is an Agronomist Engineer with a Ph.D. in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Talca (UTALCA), Chile. In collaboration with Michigan State University, he developed his doctoral thesis studying the impact of radiation (quantity and quality) under photoselective shading nets in blueberries. In Chile, he collaborated to establish the first national blueberry breeding program. In 2011, he was hired as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences (UTALCA), and today he is an active member of the Center for Plant Breeding and Phenomics. Much of his career has been devoted to: i) solving productive problems through the understanding of GxE interactions, in species of economic relevance for export markets, with particular emphasis on blueberries; and ii) plant breeding, through the development of phenomics as a way to identify outstanding individuals in several active breeding programs oriented to abiotic stresses. He currently leads competitive public projects and has authored several articles in these areas. Now he is a member of the editorial board of the journal "Food and Energy Safety" and an international consultant.

Dr. Lobos will present his studies on highbush blueberry postharvest softening.

Can plant-foods help to reverse global warming and strengthen human, animal, and planetary health?Kathleen Kevany is a social psychologist and specializes in individual and collective well-being and social change. She is Canada’s leading authority on sustainable diets and plant-rich living and the editor to large book projects in these areas. As a certified Psychotherapist, she ran her own counselling and consulting firm for 10 years called the Decentralization Intelligence Agency. Kathleen has worked in many countries on facilitating vibrant communities and collaborative relationships.  She is an Associate Professor with Dalhousie’s Faculty of Agriculture where she works to advance the Sustainable Development Goals and recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Also, she is leading innovative efforts to increase plant protein production and consumption in Atlantic Canada, and around the world as an optimal approach for health and reduced emissions.