Food Security Workshop #3

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tgi GEOSPATIAL INNOVATION FOR FOOD SECURITY CHALLENGE:
co-design workshop #3

co-design the Geospatial Innovation for Food Security Challenge

Contribute to in-person workshops and virtual collaboration sessions

Participating teams will pitch the real-world problems they think should be the focus of the upcoming Challenge.

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Workshop Information

Participants will explore how current and emergent innovations in geospatial technologies and methods can be leveraged to promote food security, collaborating to identify sets of salient problems, assess their fit with technologies with potential to address them, and evaluate the potential impact of making progress on each problem.

Take the community survey

Share what you think and help shape the Geospatial Innovation for Food Security Challenge (GIFS) by answering the five questions in our community survey.

Fill out the community survey

Location

All three in-person workshops will be held at T-Rex in St. Louis, Missouri, a non-profit innovation and entrepreneur development center dedicated to strengthening the economic vitality of St. Louis. The collaborative working sections of each workshop will be in-person only. Formal presentations and panel discussions during the workshops will be recorded and shared.

Workshop will take place on:

April 17, 2025: Pitch Day
Advocate for the problems which your team believes the community should focus on, as we wrap up the first phase of the Challenge's co-design process. During this workshop, teams will pitch their top problem to a panel of reviewers and provide peer feedback on other teams' proposals.

keynote speakers

November 13

Dr. Steven Singer

Program Director,
the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E)

A Senior Scientist in the Biological Systems and Engineering Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. At ARPA-E, he is focused on reimagining nitrogen and carbon management in agriculture and biomanufacturing.

Before joining ARPA-E, Dr. Singer was the Director of the Microbial and Enzyme Discovery Group at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, CA. His group studied the microbial bioconversion of plant biomass and greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane) to fuels and chemicals. His group has also developed several widely used software tools for metagenomic analysis to characterize microbiomes. He has published 130 papers and holds four patents.

Dr. Singer received a B.A. in chemistry from Williams College and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nishesh Chalise

Program Director,
‍Senior Manager, Institute for Economic Equity

Nishesh Chalise is passionate about using research to inform social change efforts. Grounded in community-based practice, he believes that research adds the most value when we collaborate with local stakeholders who are committed to social change.

Before joining the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, he was an assistant professor of social work at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minn. He taught baccalaureate and graduate courses on research, program evaluation and community development. He has years of experience conducting research on childhood obesity, collective action in community gardens, access to quality childhood education, sustainable natural resource management, diffusion of clean cooking technology, wealth disparities and food insecurity.

Chalise received a doctorate and master’s of social work from Washington University in St. Louis and has a Bachelor of Science degree in environmental sciences from Kathmandu University.

Workshop agenda

download Agenda

Arrival & Lunch

12:00 p.m.

Pitch preparation for participating teams

1:00 p.m.

Problem Statement pitches

2:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Wrap up and Reflections

4:00 – 4:30 p.m.

Reception with the TGI community

4:30 – 6:00 p.m.