Zachary Baquet serves as the Strategy and Learning Advisor with USAID’s Bureau for Resilience & Food Security (RFS). He leads the bureau’s Learning Team to improve the learning and knowledge sharing enabling environment within RFS and beyond. Joining USAID in 2008 as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow, he served in USAID’s former Office of Agriculture (2008-2010). In the Office of Agriculture, he worked on food security, the integration of climate change and natural resources management into agriculture programming, and knowledge management issues. Working in the Bureau for Food Security from 2010 to 2020, he led a team that provided knowledge management, training, open data, and learning agendas support to the bureau. During this time, he also launched the Agrilinks.org learning platform. Baquet has an undergraduate degree in Physics and Astronomy, Ph.D. in molecular biology, and did post-doctoral work on neurodegenerative disorders.

Dr. Catherine Nakalembe, Associate Research Professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geographical Sciences. Her research work focuses on remote sensing and machine learning applications in smallholder agriculture, food security, early warning, and disaster assessment. She is the NASA Harvest Africa Program Director and a member of the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team. NASA Harvest is NASA's Food Security and Agriculture Program. On 26 January 2022, Dr. Nakalembe was honored with the Highest Civilian Award: The Golden Jubilee Medal-Civilians of Uganda by President Yoweri Museveni. In 2020 she was named the Africa Food Prize Laureate recognizing her dedication to improving food security in Africa through the enhanced use of Earth observation.

Ekanikpong Ben is an Entrepreneur who partners with Development Agencies, Governments, Institutions and individuals to provide professional and support services to the agricultural sector and food value chain – commencing with the primary producer and moving through to the retailer and end-consumer. After spending nearly 2 decades working in energy and development sector, Ekanikpong is currently playing an important role in the development of agriculture in Southern Nigeria as he's pioneering the digitization of the agricultural sector and the development of digital solutions and database that support farmers with improved inputs, market access and weather information. Ekanikpong has published articles in Agrilinks, made presentations at UN summit and several national and international conferences, has won Awards and also a member of selected national and International professional bodies. Ekanikpong holds a BSc in Engineering Management from the University of Lincoln.

Dr. Kiersten Johnson serves as the Team Leader for the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) Management Team in USAID's Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. A sociologist and demographer, her work is grounded in more than two decades of survey methodological development, implementation, and analytical research for international development agencies. She has produced peer-reviewed publications on topics including biodiversity conservation, climate change, child nutrition, food security, gender, impacts of socioeconomic inequalities on health outcomes, HIV/AIDS, health systems, malaria, and maternal and child health and survival.

Jean Claude Rubyogo is the Global Bean Programme leader and Director of PABRA at the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Alliance). He has more than 30 years’ experience on impactful seed systems research and development, seed delivery systems, and inclusive agricultural enterprise development. For the last 20 years, he was the Seed Systems Specialist at PABRA. Jean Claude has led multi-country public-private partnership initiatives and multi-disciplinary teams developing and deploying sustainable and impact-oriented bean seed systems and complementary management in several member countries of the Pan Africa Bean Research Alliance (see http://www.pabra-africa.org). He has published/contributed to more than 114 publications on demand-led breeding, impact-oriented seed systems, agricultural technology transfer and learning.