HOSTS
Kelly Caylor, Princeton Studies Food co-founder, is an associate professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the program in Environmental Studies at Princeton Environmental Institute. He studies hydrology and food security. His research, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, seeks to develop improved insight into the way that land use and climate change interact to affect the dynamics and resilience of global drylands and to understand vulnerability of pastoral and subsistence agricultural communities to changes in water availability. He is known for hacking his Weber grill to enable the high heat required for Naples-style pizza – a favorite of his young son. PhD, Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia. kcaylor@princeton.edu
Gordon Douglas MD ’55, Princeton Studies Food co-founder, is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and is director of three biotech companies: Vical, Inc. Novadigm, and Protein Sciences. He was president of the Merck Vaccine Division, responsible for the research, development, manufacturing and marketing of Merck’s vaccine products, from 1989 until 1999. Previously, he was an infectious disease specialist with research interests in respiratory viral infections, vaccines, and antivirals at Weill Cornell Medical College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine. MD, Cornell University Medical College; National Academy of Medicine. rgdouglasjr@gmail.com
Timothy Searchinger, Princeton Studies Food co-founder, is a research scholar in the Woodrow Wilson School STEP program and a lecturer in the Princeton Environmental Institute. His work combines ecology, agronomy and economics to explore ways of meeting global food needs while reducing climate change and impacts on ecosystems. His academic work is best known for papers exploring the land use and greenhouse gas emissions of bioenergy. He is a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, for which he serves as technical director of “Creating a Sustainable Food Future: A Menu of Solutions to Sustainably Feed More than 9 Billion People by 2050.” tsearchi@princeton.edu
PANELISTS AND MODERATORS
Shiri Avnery ‘12 is co-founder and COO of Thistle, a startup based in the Bay Area whose mission is to simplify healthy living. The company delivers high quality, nutritious plant-based meals and juices directly to customers’ doorstep. She previously was a research scientist at the NYU Center on International Cooperation working on a project that investigated the potential for conflict over natural resource scarcity. She is a graduate of Princeton’s Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy, where her dissertation examined the impacts of surface ozone pollution on global agricultural production. PhD, Princeton University; MA, UT Austin; BS, Brown University. shiri@thistle.co
David Benzaquen is the founder and CEO of PlantBased Solutions, a mission-driven, marketing and management consulting agency for plant-based consumer packaged product companies. In addition to helping launch and grow plant-based brands, PlantBased Solutions manages a syndicate of angel and venture capital investors interested in plant-based business opportunities. David is an advisor at various food incubators and accelerators, including The Brooklyn FoodWorks and Food-X. He is a contributing writer to the New Food Economy and New Hope Natural Media’s IdeaXchange. Bachelor’s, American University; Master’s, The New School. david@plantbasedsolutions.com
Lev Berlin ‘07, is founder, owner and developer of ReciPal, which provides easy nutrition analysis, nutrition fact labels, ingredient lists, recipe costing, and inventory management for food businesses — the idea of which grew out of those needs for SlantShack, a grass-fed jerky company. Since then, he has begun developing software for similar small food businesses to help them get started. He enjoys helping small companies navigate the startup process. lev@recipal.com
Beth Burrough ‘85 is partner and chief marketing officer for PurFoods, LLC, a provider of fresh-made meals delivered directly to seniors’ and patients’ doorsteps nationwide under the brand name Mom’s Meal NourishCare. PurFoods predominantly partners with health care organizations and government agencies, but also offers meals direct to consumer. She previously worked for Johnson & Johnson in Consumer and Pharmaceutical strategic marketing. She serves on Princeton’s Women in Leadership Steering Committee and Stony Brook Millstone Watershed’s Board of Trustees. MBA, Harvard Business School. beth.burrough@purfoods.com
Jenna Cameron is a Northern California transplant who grew up in a small town in Wisconsin. An avid reader and documentary nerd, she became obsessed with the state of the food industry while in college. After graduating, Jenna took a number of internships in the nonprofit sector, targeting organizations in sustainability and food education. During this time, she toured the country and lived on a bus with the Warped Tour, talking to thousands of people every day. She has been with Hampton Creek,a technology company pioneering in food, for two years. BA, Public Relations and Psychology, Winona State in Minnesota. jcameron@hamptoncreek.com
Anne Cheng ’85 is Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Assimilation, Psychoanalysis, and Hidden Grief and Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. She is currently working on two projects: one on critical race studies at the intersection of critical food and animal studies and the other on Asiatic femininity and the philosophic history of the “ornament.” She taught previously at Harvard University and UC Berkeley before returning to Princeton. MA in Creative Writing, Stanford; PhD in Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley. aacheng@princeton.edu
Rozalie Czesana ‘18 is majoring in the Woodrow Wilson School with certificates in Environmental Studies and Urban Studies. On campus she pursues her interest in sustainable food and agriculture by taking relevant classes such as Economics of Food & Agriculture and by being a member of several food-related organizations, including Princeton Studies Food, Spoon University Princeton, Greening Dining and the Princeton Farmer’s Market. Her favorite part of food studies is the new interdisciplinary course, FRS 138: Science, Society & Dinner, where she assists instructors Kelly Caylor and Chef Craig Shelton. rczesana@princeton.edu
Beth Q. Diamond ‘85 is the founder of Cook for a Change, a program to teach cooking and raise awareness of how food can change lives and connect people to each other and the world in which we live. Beth considers herself lucky to have been exposed to cooking fresh foods from scratch from childhood, and to the global cuisines and cultures from her 23-year stay in San Francisco. Her passion for teaching blossomed when she moved to St. Louis, where she was inspired to promote food literacy by teaching cooking to inner city teens. She is eager to continue her teaching in Dallas, her new food playground. bethQdiamond@gmail.com
Nancy Easton ’88 is the executive director and founder of Wellness in the Schools, a national nonprofit that inspires healthy eating and physical activity in public schools. The 501c3 empowers schools to provide healthy, scratch-cooked meals, active recess periods, and fitness and nutrition education. School administration certificate, Fordham University. Master’s, Bank Street College of Education. nancy@wellnessintheschools.org
Lyndon Estes is an associate research scholar with the Woodrow Wilson School and Civil and Environmental Engineering and a lecturer in the Princeton Environmental Institute. His research, which grew from early years of managing nature reserves in South Africa, focuses primarily on lowering agriculture’s environmental costs – one of the biggest drivers of global change. This challenge requires data entrepreneurship, or new ways to collect and analyze the information needed to understand the tradeoffs between agricultural benefits (e.g. food security) and environmental costs (e.g. carbon emissions). BA English, Georgetown University; M Phil, Conservation Biology, University of Cape Town; PhD, Environmental Science, University of Virginia. lestes@princeton.edu
Pietro Frassica has been a professor of Italian at Princeton since 1976. His principal work focuses on the Renaissance, the Eighteenth Century, contemporary literature and theater. He is the author of more than 100 published articles and six books. Although he is a literary scholar, since 1992 he has taught courses on food studies, such as ITA 319 (The Literature of Gastronomy) and ITA 309 (Italy – The Land of Slow Food.) Both courses have been important because they continue to stimulate conversations about food and its relationship with politics, history, art and cinema. Through these courses, he has been able to instill in students’ minds a heightened respect for the value of food. frassica@princeton
Suzy Friedman ’94 is an expert in environmental science and policy, nutrient use efficiency, agricultural sustainability, agricultural supply chains, USDA conservation programs, and precision agriculture. She directs the work of the Environmental Defense Fund to collaborate with farmers, grower organizations, agribusinesses, and food company/retail partners in creating create a US agricultural system that drives climate stability and clean water and supports food security goals. By collaborating with decision makers at every point in the supply chain, EDF is strengthening demand for sustainable production and generating supply. MS, Environmental Science and Policy, Johns Hopkins University. sfriedman@edf.org
Rob Glucksman ‘88 owns and runs Witgang Far East Ltd., a Hong Kong trading company importing specialty fertilizers and chemicals to China and Vietnam. He has introduced advanced micronutrient fertility and water-management technology to growers ranging from advanced to semi-literate, often in demanding conditions, working to improve yields and quality and reduce inputs, particularly on fruits, vegetables, and potatoes. His career in Asia began when he went to central China with Princeton-in-Asia. rob@witgang.com
Reuwai Mount Hanewald ’94, her parents, Pam and Gary Mount (’66) and sister, Tannwen Mount (’98) own and operate Terhune Orchards, where they grow 40 types of fruits and vegetables on 200 acres in Princeton. The farm also includes a bakery, vineyard and winery, greenhouses, pick your own, barn yard, and farm market. Terhune Orchards receives 700,000 visitors a year and is known for its organic and innovative farming and successful marketing practices. Reuwai recently returned to the farm full time after 20 years as a science department chair and secondary school teacher at schools in the United States, Central America and West Africa. reuwai@gmail.com
Cornelia Huellstrunk is the executive director of the Keller Center, where she is focused on enabling others to use entrepreneurship, innovation and design thinking to transform their passions into ventures, innovations and actions. These learnings can be applied to any passion area including food entrepreneurship. Bachelor’s, Columbia University; Master’s, Universitaet des Saarlandes, Saarbruecken, Germany. chuellst@princeton.edu
Andrew Ive is the managing director for Food-X, and a managing director at SOSV responsible for building, innovating and supporting the emerging Food X ecosystem. P&G brand-management trained while in his dorm room, he took a new product idea, raised angel funds, established a manufacturing facility in China and a sales force to sell his first solo product line into major US retailers. In his second Silicon Valley based company Open Shelf, Andrew raised $20M+ from VCs to focus on the data challenge between retailers and their vendors. That company was acquired. He focuses on innovation, developing high-growth businesses opportunities and as a business advisor. He served on the Board of the Small Business Council of the Department of Trade and Industry advising the UK Government on entrepreneurialism and high growth companies; the National Science Foundation on startup grant awards, the Investment Task Force and the Centre for Policy Studies, Small Business Council (UK Think Tank). He is the author of Choose Your Startup: Funding Your Company. His first product design, the X-IT Ladder, is in the permanent collection at MOMA. BSc, University of London; MBA, Harvard. andrew.ive@food-x.com
Marty Johnson ‘81 is founder, president and CEO of Isles Inc., a self-help, urban green development organization in Trenton, NJ. Born of a student-initiated seminar at Princeton University in 1981, Isles fosters sustainable development through real estate planning and development, urban agriculture, environmental health, wealth creation and education and training. He is also a founding director of Building One New Jersey, New Jersey Community Loan Fund (now New Jersey Community Capital), Housing and Community Development Network of NJ, and the Success Measures Project, a national effort to develop impact measures for community-building work. He is a former trustee and Executive Committee member of Princeton University, where he also teaches as the James Wei Visiting Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Keller Center. He moved to Trenton in 1981, where he and his wife Liz have raised three sons.
Derek Kleinow ‘04 is an NYC-based entrepreneur, angel investor, and member of Amazon Web Service’s startup team. Prior to joining AWS, Derek co-founded Real Food Works, a healthy meal delivery platform that partners with talented local chefs and restaurants to prepare and deliver healthy and delicious meals every week. As an angel investor, startup advisor, and founding member of First Round Capital’s Dorm Room Fund, he has invested in many startups and mentored hundreds. He began his career from his dorm room at Princeton University in 2001 when he founded an online retailer, TigerGPS, which he bootstrapped to become a $20 million business that he later sold to BrandShop LLC. derek.kleinow@gmail.com
Evelyn Hanna Laffey is the associate director of the Council on Science and Technology. Prior to joining Princeton, she was assistant director of the Upward Bound program at the University of the Virgin Islands, a lecturer of mathematics with Rowan University, and assistant dean of Engineering Education at Rutgers University. Her commitment to ensuring an excellent and equitable education for all students shows in her teaching and research and in her role as an administrator in higher education. She works with faculty, students, and staff to foster the development of courses, intellectual exchange, and synergies that broaden and deepen participation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. She has served as the PI or Co-PI on over $2M in grants aimed at enhancing STEM education. Bachelor’s and EdD in mathematics education, Rutgers. elaffey@Princeton.EDU
Stephen Pacala is a professor in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He is interested in the processes that govern ecological communities, the interplay between community and ecosystem-level processes and the interactions between the globe biosphere and climate. His research focuses on all aspects of the global carbon cycle and is in collaboration with ecologists, physical and biological oceanographers and atmospheric scientists and investigates issues ranging from the effects of global vegetation on climate to large-scale measurement of natural and anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. pacala@princeton.edu
Alexander Pessala ‘09 is principal at Middleland Capital, an investment firm that specializes in early stage technology companies. The company has a large concentration into the agriculture-technology space, specifically around technologies that either help farmers optimize their yields, or those that improve the very wasteful supply chain worldwide. apessala@middlelandcapital.com
Carolyn Rouse is a professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her work explores the nexus between race, institutions, and social inequality; her teaching includes the course Food and Power. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (2004), Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009), and Televised Redemption: The Media Production of Black Jews, Christians and Muslims (2016). She has also produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015). crouse@princeton.edu
Jonathan Waxman P’19 is a native Californian, a chef, a restaurateur, a mentor, an author — and was a key player in the development of California Cuisine. His restaurants today include Barbuto and Jams in New York; Adele’s and Bajo Sexto, with partners, in Nashville; and Ponce City Market in Atlanta. Jonathan participated in two seasons of Top Chef Masters on Bravo. His first cookbook, A Great American Cook, was published in 2007 and Italian, My Way was released in April 2011. He is a founding partner of Nashville’s Music City Food + Wine Festival and works closely with many charities, including Citymeals-on-Wheels and Alex’s Lemonade Stand. He and his family live in Manhattan. Grand Diplôme, La Varenne School. jonathan@barbutonyc.com
Holly Welles is co-administrator of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative and communications manager at the Princeton Environmental Institute. She serves on the boards of the Yale University Alumni Association Board of Governors, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Alumni Association (President, 2011-13), and the D&R Greenway Land Trust. She held previous energy and environment positions at the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the US Agency for International Development and the Council on Environmental Quality. She began her career as an energy and environment legislative aide to Congressman George Brown (D-CA). MFS, Yale; PhD, UC Berkeley; Switzer Environmental Fellowship; Morris K. Udall Dissertation Fellowship. hwelles@princeton.edu
Silvia Weyerbrock is a lecturer in the Department of Economics. Her research focuses on agricultural trade policy, multilateral trade liberalization and regional economic integration. She currently teaches Economics of Food and Agriculture (ECO 355/ENV 355), International Economics (WWS 542) and Economics of Europe (ECO 372/EPS 342). “Diplom,” University of Göttingen; MS, PhD, UC Berkeley. sweyerbr@princeton.edu.
Adam Wolf is an expert in agronomy and agricultural economics and is the CEO of Arable, a company he developed as a postdoc at Princeton that offers opportunities for data-driven decisions in agriculture. Already, the work has earned $4M in NSF funding for agricultural monitoring and forecasting in East Africa. He studied agronomy and agricultural economics, conducted field research in Kazakhstan on livestock development and land management and on linking satellite data and plant growth forecasting models. MSc UC Davis; PhD Stanford. adam@arable.com
Xin Zhang is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. She is particularly interested in evaluating how socioeconomic and biogeochemical processes affect the global nitrogen cycle and, in turn, provide policy input on mitigating nitrogen pollution while meeting global food and biofuel demands. Her research approaches are from natural science, including the Earth System Model and atmospheric measurements, and from social science, such as econometrics analysis. Collaborating with economists, modelers, and field experimentalists, Xin has published papers on various peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. PhD, Yale; Postdoc, Princeton. xin.zhang@umces.edu
CAREER SERVICES FOOD MEETUP
Juliette Dupré is the Senior Technical Recruiter for Plated, where the mission is to help people eat and live better by leveraging technology to make mealtimes better. Juliette has been recruiting for about 7 years, focused on tech and games, after a prior career as a paralegal in product and employment law. She has served on a variety of academic industry advisory boards and vetted more than 10,000 technical and creative talents from intern to C-level. Plated is a VC-backed startup using technology to make it easier for you to eat better. Plated offers a culinary subscription featuring pre-measured, organic, sustainable, seasonal recipe kits shipped in environmentally-friendly packaging. Its tech stack makes it possible to get fresh, high-quality food from local sources to tables in a more efficient way than ever before. Its mission includes helping to fix the broken and waste-ridden food supply chain in the US. juliette.dupre@plated.com
Pat Huizing, phuizing@nofanj.org
Amy Jacobs is the FoodCorps New Jersey Fellow helping support the state’s service members. FoodCorps is a nationwide team of AmeriCorps leaders who connect kids to real food and help them grow up healthy. Through a partnership with AmeriCorps, the group recruits, trains and places emerging leaders into limited-resource schools for a year of service implementing a hree-ingredient recipe for healthy kids. Our service members provide: Knowledge: food and nutrition education that gives kids the information they need to make smart choices Engagement: hands-on activities like gardening and cooking that foster skills and pride around healthy food Access: lunch trays filled with nutritious meals from local farms. Amy previously served in Camden, New Jersey at the Center for Environmental Transformation. amy.jacobs@foodcorps.org
Juhea Kim ’09 (Art and Archaeology) started her career with designers Devi Kroell and Adam Lippes before launching her menswear line, funded by an angel investor. Finding that she preferred going to bookstores rather than clothing stores, she moved on to the editorial department at Alfred A. Knopf. In July 2013, she co-founded Peaceful Dumpling, a vegan lifestyle digital media company, and transitioned to doing it full time in February 2014. Over the next two years, she grew Peaceful Dumpling to become one of the most popular vegan sites in the U.S., while also freelancing for sites like Huffington Post and Martha Stewart, and writing her first book. She is currently the Editor in Chief of Pulsd, a lifestyle media and eCommerce startup based in SoHo, the Editor in Chief of Peaceful Dumpling, and a fiction writer represented by Brandt & Hochman Agency. juheakim@gmail.com
Josh Oeltjen, joshua.oeltjen@gmail.com
Danny Steiner ’10 (Religion) is the co-founder and Chief Evangelist of BRAMI Beans, a snack food company that is bringing the high protein/fiber superfood of the ancient Roman soldier to America. Just launched last January, BRAMI Beans are already in nearly 30 independent markets in NYC and expanding quickly, with its eye on California and the tri-state area. Danny began his career working in Los Angeles in TV development, first at WME (the talent agency), then NBC, as both the Chairman’s executive assistant and development coordinator, and then finally Shine America, where he focused on scripted and unscripted development. He switched gears a bit and spent a year and a half working at MediaLink, a media and tech consultancy with clients like Conde Nast, Hulu, Fox, and JPMC. danny@bramibeans.com
