Moderator and speaker bios
Jenny Splitter (Moderator) is an award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief of Sentient, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet covering the impacts of factory farming on climate change, food systems, animals, health, policy and more. Her work has been published in leading publications including The Guardian, Popular Mechanics, Undark and New York Magazine.
Dr Harriet Bartlett (Panelist) is an interdisciplinary scientist working on figuring out and incentivising the best ways to farm for people, the planet and the animals we farm. Her background is in preclinical veterinary medicine, which she studied at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD (also at the University of Cambridge) focused on comparing the carbon footprint, biodiversity impacts, antimicrobial use and animal welfare of a broad range of UK and Brazilian pig production systems - from intensive through to organic systems. She conducted by far the largest study of its kind – personally visiting and collecting data from more than 150 farms. She found tradeoffs were not inevitable and identified the types of farms that best limit negative externalities. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, BBC Farming today and she presented it at New Scientist Live. She is now a Research Fellow in Biology and Geography at the University of Oxford and leads the HESTIA farm trials, which aim to find ways to reduce the impacts of farms - at a rate fast enough and scale large enough to meet planetary goals. She is running the first robust large-scale trials testing of the effects of giving real farmers information on their impacts - currently focused on European pigs, dairy, and crops, Brazilian beef, Kenyan maize, and Vietnamese shrimp.
Josh Milburn (Panelist) is a Lecturer in Political Philosophy at Loughborough University in the UK. His research asks what it means to take animals seriously in moral, legal, and political thought. Josh is the author of 2022's Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (from McGill-Queen's University Press) and 2023's Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (from Oxford University Press); he's currently working on Animals, State, and Utopia: Robert Nozick's Animal Ethics, under contract with Oxford University Press. Josh is also the host of the animal studies podcast Knowing Animals.
Hibba Mazhary (Panelist) is currently finishing up her part-time PhD at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, focusing on the geographies of slaughter and consumption in the British halal meat industry, including consumer motivations, ethics, certification, and the relationship between meat consumption and exposure to animal death. She teaches undergraduate human geography at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She has worked as a research assistant on several projects, including on meat normalisation narratives in the media, laboratory animal welfare, and parenting and the gut microbiome.
Nikki Yoxall (Panelist) Head of Research at Pasture for Life, and a first-generation farmer based in NE Scotland, where she co-runs Grampian Graziers – working with local landowners to graze cattle for ecological and biodiversity benefit, whilst selling 100% pasture and tree-fed beef to the local community. Nikki is currently undertaking a PhD in Agroecological Transitions and has interests in Holistic Management, agroforestry, and connecting folk with their food.
Cleo Verkuijl (Panelist)’s research focuses on legal and political dimensions of UN sustainable development and climate policy, just and healthy dietary transitions, and animal health and welfare. Cleo has led several multidisciplinary research projects on One Health and just transition approaches to food systems transformation. She was a coordinating lead author of UNEP’s “What’s Cooking” Frontiers report, on the potential of novel meat and dairy alternatives. In 2023-24 she was a visiting research fellow at Harvard Law School. Cleo has also served as coordinating lead author of the first two Production Gap Reports. Produced by leading research organizations and the UN, this is the first assessment of the gap between the targets of the Paris Agreement and countries’ planned production of coal, oil, and gas. A Team Leader and Writer for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin since 2015, Cleo has reported on UN processes on climate, ozone, and the Sustainable Development Goals, among others. She has taught environmental law and policy as an Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, and as a tutor for the University of Edinburgh. Cleo has previously worked for the UN Environment Programme in Brussels and was a policy officer with the NGO network Climate Action Network International during the Paris climate negotiations. She holds an LL.M. in Global Environment and Climate Law from the University of Edinburgh.
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