Farms Prosper - Nature Thrives
Team
James Waltham
Executive Chairman
25 years’ experience of working in international agriculture and horticulture. A farmer’s son from Dorset, originally an agronomist but over his career has worked for a number of large, international fresh produce and farming businesses. More recently working with agri-tech businesses including vertical farming, robotics and sensor tech.
Dr Lars von Borcke
Business Development Director
Over 20 years of experience in commercialisation of early stage technologies by licensing and working with development partners across life sciences. Extensive project management experience in the Ag industry (AstraZeneca & Syngenta) leading various groups in supply chain optimisation. Project lead on nitrate sensor development project.
Prof Tony Miller
Chief Scientific Officer
Over 35 years of experience in crop and soil nutrient cycling. Head of Biochemistry and Metabolism at JIC, focusing on root/soil nutrient cycling with particular interest in nitrogen. A Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher for the last three years, serving on the Editorial Board of two international journals. Honorary Professorships at UEA and University of Nanjing.
Dr Yi Chen
Lead Scientist
A post-doctoral scientist working at JIC in the Miller lab with significant experience in making and using soil nitrate and potassium sensors and in data logging and processing. He has used soil sensors in field trials and soil columns experiments to monitor the leaching of nitrate.
Paul Fretter
Chief Data Officer
More than 30 years of experience providing and supporting IT and high performance computing infrastructure in the life sciences. Established the Norwich Bioscience Institute's research computing service, grew an expert team and led the development of data centres, HPC and storage strategy.
Dr Martin Vickers
Data/AI Infrastructure Officer
A Senior Scientist at the Informatics platform of the John Innes Centre, focusing on various genomics, phenotyping, and bioinformatics initiatives. Prior to this, Martin was an experienced Systems Administrator who has built and managed infrastructure to meet the needs of researchers in a variety of fields including maths, physics and the life sciences.