Leah Garcés is the president of international non-profit animal advocacy organisation Mercy For Animals and author of Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry.

Martin Rowe is the co-founder and publisher at Lantern Books. For the last three years, he has followed the development of a new generation of plant-based meat and dairy analogues, as well as that of cultured or “clean” meat. Drawing on research encapsulated in his paper, Beyond the Impossible: The Future of Plant-based and Cellular Meat and Dairy, which he wrote for Brighter Green and the Vegan America Project, Rowe notes some of the challenges accompanying these developments in the food, environmental, and technological spaces.

Hibba Mazhary is a part-time PhD student in Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. She divides her time between her thesis, teaching undergraduates, and undertaking various part-time research assistant roles, including one most recently at the RSPCA on laboratory rat welfare. Hibba is interested in all things farm animal welfare and food sustainability.

Susann Schade is a research associate and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Agricultural and Nutritional Sciences at the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany, where she previously studied agriculture and area studies. Susann focused on life cycle assessment for her master’s thesis in which she compared the environmental impacts of different fruits and vegetables. She subsequently joined the cluster project “NovAL (Novel microalgae species as a sustainable source of bioactive nutrients in human nutrition)” of four German universities to investigate the environmental impacts of microalgae cultivation.

Tara Garnett is a researcher at the University of Oxford where she runs the Food Climate Research Network and its sister site Foodsource.  Her work centres on the interactions among food, climate, health and broader sustainability issues.  She has particular interests in livestock as an area where many of these converge, and in how knowledge is communicated to and interpreted by policy makers, civil society and industry, and in their different approaches to food problems and solutions. Tara is also part of the LEAP project at Oxford, a Wellcome Trust-funded initiative focused on gaining a greater understanding of the health, environmental, social and economic effects of livestock production and consumption.  In particular she works closely with Jamie Lorimer, Alex Sexton and Nathan Clay, on themes which explore the rise in alternatives to animal products, and transitions in the dairy sector. You can contact Tara on taragarnett@fcrn.org.uk.

Christina O’Sullivan is the Campaign & Communications Manager at Feedback, where she manages the ‘Fishy Business’ campaign. Feedback is a campaign group working to regenerate nature by transforming the food system. Christina has an MSc in Food Policy from the Centre for Food Policy, City University. She has worked at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and the Global Centre for Food Systems Innovation at Michigan State University.

Kelly Reed is the programme manager for the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food, University of Oxford and an archaeobotanist with interests in food systems, agricultural development, cultural adaptations to environmental change and global sustainability. Philippa Ryan is a Research Fellow in Economic Botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where her research focuses on traditional agriculture, crop histories and agrobiodiversity.