Agerpoint Welcomes Dr. Howard-Yana Shapiro to its Advisory Board
Agerpoint is proud to welcome Dr. Howard-Yana Shapiro to its Advisory Board. Dr. Shapiro has been involved with sustainable agricultural and agroforestry systems, plant breeding, molecular biology and genetics for over 50 years. He has worked with indigenous communities, NGO’s, governmental agencies and the private sector around the world.
“We are honored to have such a distinguished expert and thought leader join our team,“ said Agerpoint CEO, Kevin Lang. “Dr. Shapiro brings decades of knowledge and experience that will help us further scale our agriculture and climate solutions for greater impact.”
Dr. Howard-Yana Shapiro served for 20 years as the Chief Agricultural Officer for Mars, Incorporated, with agriculture, agroforestry, food security and food safety projects in Africa, SE Asia, India, China, The Americas.
His academic career spans 45 years, a former Fulbright Scholar and Ford Foundation Fellow and a winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities Award. He was lead author in the IAASTD chapter on Biotechnology and Biodiversity. He was Chairperson of the Board of the Agriculture Sustainability Institute at UC Davis for 10 years. He served as the Co-Chairperson for the 1st and 2nd World Congress of Agroforestry. In 2014 he co-authored the Mid-Term Review of the CGIAR with Sir John Beddington.
He led the global effort sequencing, assembling and annotating the Theobroma cacao genome, which was put in the public domain for free access to all.
Shapiro founded the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) and the African Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA). The effort will sequence, assemble and annotate 101 key food cultivars, the backbone of African nutrition. The AfPBA will train 150 mid-career African scientists in modern breeding technology.
In October of 2018 he launched the Foldit Aflatoxin Puzzle with 460,000 online gamers to redesign and improve enzymes to degrade aflatoxin. Currently, 15 newly designed enzymes are in laboratory testing to detoxify aflatoxin in storage.
About Agerpoint:
Agerpoint is an innovator in geospatial intelligence and data engineering that develops technologies to digitize, analyze and comprehend natural environments.
Through a combination of artificial intelligence, high performance computing and advanced analytics, the Agerpoint platform fuses together sensor data from terrestrial vehicles, mobile devices, drones and satellites with other information and human observations to create a highly precise, quantifiable and interactive digital record to enable better decision-making for clients across agrochemical and food and beverage R&D, forestry, production agriculture, government and conservation organizations.
Agerpoint's Know Your Carbon™ serves to provide credibility and transparency to carbon credits by leveraging Agerpoint’s unique ability to create highly accurate 3D plant models and efficiently extract physical measurements and health information using automation and AI.
With these advancements, our mission is to improve quality of life for our planet’s inhabitants and mitigate climate change by enabling a transformational shift in how we measure and understand plants, crops and forests along with vegetation that coexists within built environments.
To learn more about Agerpoint, please visit www.agerpoint.com.
