Agriculture, food & environment

Agrobiodiversity, crop genetics, food production, climate and desertification.

30 contributions across 4 experiences

Where this industry appears in the career

Often together withPublic sector & international organisations Scientific research & academia Logistics & supply chain Technology consulting & IT services Biopharma, global health & life sciences Manufacturing, chemicals & industrials

2002–201116 contributions

United Nations CGIAR

Coordinated a network of content and data providers in 20+ regional offices worldwide, enabling knowledge sharing and collaboration across the UN system.
Member of the Academic Committee of the Faculty of Engineering in Information Science at the University of Rome San Paolo, supervising 40+ master’s theses on digital and data science.
Held full responsibility for project budgets — an annual technology and innovation budget of about USD 500,000 — and managed cross-functional teams on large-scale digital transformation, achieving USD 100,000 cost savings in a single project, presented at the UN ShareFair.
Led enterprise SharePoint programmes (2003–2010 editions), delivering governance, templates, workflows and institutional training.
Designed a new data governance framework for the UN agency IPGRI (International Plant Genetic Resources Institute), aligned with DAMA and applying ISO/IEC 27001 principles, setting data-management standards for global agricultural research.
Designed the R&D bioinformatics data standard “Darwin Core Germplasm”, extending the Darwin Core international standard for agrobiodiversity analytics, presented at the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference 2010 in Woods Hole, USA.
Designed and managed 40+ institutional knowledge-management platforms — intranets, repositories, websites and scientific databases — and rationalised them into about a dozen governed platforms under common taxonomy, metadata and governance standards.
Led global initiatives across digital, data science, knowledge management and bioinformatics, progressing from Multimedia Web Specialist to Digital Unit Head with responsibility for strategic planning and implementation.
Coached and managed teams on digital projects applied to plant genetics for food production in developing countries, motivating internal talent and external partners; created an Innovation Lab and innovation meetings to bring innovation into the organisation.
Built partnerships with universities, vendors and research institutes in data science, digital transformation and business intelligence.
Collaborated on international data-analytics projects on genomic datasets and global ontologies (PlantGDB, GBIF, AGROVOC, AIMS, Dublin Core).
Developed digital tools and methods for genetics and omics research for food production, including federated access, SOA services, RESTful applications and data standards.
Led the design, delivery and launch of the United Nations CGXchange Analytics Platform, enabling advanced analytics, data manipulation and cross-agency access for omics, germplasm, plant and species datasets. Evidence ↗
Developed a digital crop-identification platform combining taxonomies, scientific datasets and AI-assisted recognition for agricultural biodiversity research.
Developed data-visualisation portals for Asian tropical fruits and other agricultural datasets, launched in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to support research in Central Asia and developing countries.
Designed and developed “Information Finder”, a semantic-search portal for crop datasets and genetic material for agrobiodiversity and food-production research, launched at IFPRI in Washington DC.

2012–201311 contributions

United Nations

Led a team of data scientists and architects on a climate-change project, designing a large-scale data architecture managing 1.2 billion records to analyse agrobiodiversity.
Implemented time-series analysis across 3,875 plant sensors in 12 countries for real-time monitoring of climate impact on agricultural systems.
Authored technical documentation defining recommended criteria for national and international data platforms and enterprise data architecture for desertification datasets, presented to Prime Ministers of several countries at UNCCD COP 10. Evidence ↗
Directed the integration of research data from 1,260 institutes worldwide through GBIF, spanning 358 taxonomies and ontologies, for analytics, reporting and scientific insight.
Designed multi-country sensor-data collection architectures, integrating real-time climate datasets from thousands of sensors into unified analytical systems.
Engineered REST/SOA services enabling cross-agency interoperability for scientific and environmental data platforms.
Built semantic data-integration components harmonising agrobiodiversity datasets with global ontologies for multi-agency use.
Established a corporate taxonomy and knowledge-management framework for UNCCD (Protégé, OWL), strengthening discoverability, semantic interoperability, information governance and institutional knowledge reuse.
Designed and documented a UN institutional data-governance framework, including enterprise database analysis and entity-relationship modelling for multi-country, multi-agency data systems. Evidence ↗
Applied time-series and dimensional modelling, including slowly changing dimensions, to real-time IoT and environmental sensor data.
Coordinated communities of practice and regional offices to scale analytics capabilities, data literacy and collaboration, and supported the application of the Dublin Core (DCMI) taxonomy to publications.

2024–20251 contribution

EPAM Systems

Global agribusiness and food company, Switzerland: defined the GenAI strategy for shipping and transport optimisation, structuring 18+ use cases (laytime calculations, contract analysis, chartering risk mitigation) with OCR, NLP, LLMs and knowledge graphs.

2019–20241 contribution

DSM-Firmenich

Led the development of a machine-learning model to reduce the causes of gas emissions in wastewater treatment plants for vitamins, providing concrete strategies for environmental impact reduction.

Profile1 contribution

Across the career

Designs scientific data ecosystems combining semantic search, ontology integration, knowledge management and global biodiversity datasets.

All industries

Retail, consumer goods & e-commerce 55 Scientific research & academia 55 Public sector & international organisations 54 Biopharma, global health & life sciences 52 Agriculture, food & environment 30 Technology consulting & IT services 30 Logistics & supply chain 16 Manufacturing, chemicals & industrials 11 Banking & financial services 8 Media & publishing 4 Energy 2 Telecommunications 2