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Multiscale modeling of the food system
The American Institute of Mathematics
The following compilation of participant contributions is only intended as a lead-in to the
AIM workshop “Multiscale modeling of the food system.” This material is not for public
distribution.
Corrections and new material are welcomed and can be sent to workshops@aimath.org
Version: Fri Apr 24 13:57:08 2015
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A. Participant Contributions
1. Alajajian, Sharon
2. Anderies, J. Marty
3. Anderson, James
4. Canning, Patrick
5. Clifton, Sara
6. Cooper, Karen
7. Engler, Hans
8. Etemadnia, Hamideh
9. Fanzo, Jessica
10. Gustafson, Dave
11. Helfgott, Ariella
12. Hoyer-Leitzel, Alanna
13. Ingram, John
14. Irfan, Mohammad
15. Jones, James
16. Kaper, Hans
17. Libertini, Jessica
18. Lord, Steven
19. Meyer, Katherine
20. Nelson, Erik
21. Nikolic, Igor
22. Schweizer, Vanessa
23. Stewart, Gavin
24. Viens, Frederi
25. Wiebe, Keith
Table of Contents
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Chapter A: Participant Contributions
A.1 Alajajian, Sharon
I am a recent graduate of the Master of Science in Statistics program at the University
of Vermont (UVM) and am currently a research assistant at the Vermont Complex Systems
Center (VCSC) at UVM. In part, my work there has focused on food and physical activity
phrase frequencies on the Twitter social network and their geospatial relationships with
statewide health demographics. Before this, I completed the Master of Public Administration
program at UVM with a focus on health and healthcare policy, including a class on food
safety and public policy. I worked in pediatric public health for two-and-a-half years before
working with the VCSC.
I am very interested in participating in the AIM multiscale modeling of the food system
workshop because its goal is to inform intervention strategies for improving sustainable food
and nutrition security for all people. Based on my most recent work at the VCSC, I believe
that public social media data can provide a valuable lens from which to view the (tweeting)
consumer stakeholders of the food system, and I hope to be able to contribute in that regard.
I hope to meet others who share the goal of modeling the food system with an overarching goal of informing policy to improve food security. I hope to learn about aspects of
the food system with which I am less familiar to gain a more rounded perspective on food
systems.
A.2 Anderies, J. Marty
My research interests focus on developing an understanding of how ecological, behavioral, social, and institutional factors affect the robustness/vulnerability characteristics of
social-ecological systems. I combine qualitative insights from present-day, historical, and
archaeological case studies of social-ecological systems with formal mathematical modeling
and experiments with human subjects to study how individual decision-making processes
interact with governance regimes to influence social and environmental outcomes.
I became interested in resource governance when looking at clear cuts in Washington,
Oregon, and British Columbia and massive environmental pressure while living in China...
I have long worked on food security and robust governance of small scale irrigation
systems. I am interested in scaling up....
I hope to meet other colleagues interested in food systems and become more familiar
with potential mathematical approaches to represent their dynamics..
A.3 Anderson, James
I am a professor of Food and Resource Economics and director of a new Institute for
Global Food Systems at the University of Florida. Prior to joining UF, I was the advisor
for Oceans, Fisheries and Aquaculture and leader of the Global Program on Fisheries and
Aquaculture at The World Bank. My research has focused on natural resource management,
fisheries and aquaculture economics, markets and international trade. Recent work has been
directed toward the role of seafood in food security, constraints to aquaculture development,
and evaluating how aquaculture and well-designed public-private partnerships are changing
global natural resource use in both developed and developing nations. I received my PhD
from UC Davis, MS from U Arizona and BS from the College of William and Mary.
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A.4 Canning, Patrick
I am a Senior Research Economist for USDAs Economic Research Service (ERS). I
study the US food system with a focus on research that informs food policy discussions at
the Federal level. My recent published research includes two in-depth ERS reports; one
that provides a detailed answer to the question Where do our food-dollars go? and another
that assesses energy use throughout the US food system. Other recently published journal
articles include a study that demonstrates a general framework to objectively assess input
data quality used to calibrate multiregional data systems, and two forthcoming articles
that provide international comparisons on the formation of food costs and the transmission
of price shocks along the agri-food chain. I also coauthored a recently published article
that examines the optimal locations for transportation hubs in a national fresh produce
distribution network, and Im currently working on an extension of this study that examines
the supplier roles in seasonal fresh produce value chains. I am a principal investigator
for two transdisciplinary research projects, and much of my research is directed towards
these projects. One project seeks to assess whether policies promoting healthy diets and
policies promoting food system sustainability are complementary or competing. Another
brings together an interdisciplinary team of scientists and expert practitioners to evaluate
the viability of scaling up and scaling out specific value chains to alleviate food insecurity
among the underserved populations of the Northeastern US.
A.5 Clifton, Sara
I am a third year PhD candidate in the Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics department at Northwestern University. For the past two years, I have developed and
analyzed a minimal dynamical system model of biological ornament evolution with my advisor Professor Danny Abrams. The evolution of ornaments involves countless complicating
factors, from varying time scales to randomness in genetic mutations to changing environmental conditions. Yet our minimal model with only four tuning parameters qualitatively
captures what we see in nature. In particular, the model predicts that ornament size within
a population will stratify into two morphs, which is seen in many species.
We are wrapping up the ornament evolution project, and the timing of this April
workshop is ideal for me to begin a new project that could become my dissertation. The
conceptual modeling of food systems fits perfectly within my mathematical interests of developing minimal, dynamical systems models. But more than this, agriculture matters to
me personally. I grew up on a small-scale cattle and hay farm, and so I have experience with
food systems at the lowest level. Additionally, my sister currently works as a grain trader,
and she has helped me see the food system at a higher level. I have witnessed first-hand how
complicating factors, such as changing climate, government policies, varying dietary choices,
and wealth distribution, affect the food system. I would find it immensely rewarding to help
better understand the relationships among people, food, and environment.
I am also excited to collaborate with experts directly involved with the food system. I
rarely have the opportunity to work on problems that have the potential to directly influence
people and policy, and working with experts in the field will connect a mathematical model
with the real world. I also look forward to collaborating with and learning from other mathematicians. As a mathematician-in-training, I want to develop my skills within modeling
and dynamical systems. As a participant in this workshop, I will contribute my dynamical
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systems background, my enthusiasm for food systems, my curiosity and open-mindedness,
and my eagerness to continue this project for several years after the workshop.
A.6 Cooper, Karen
I am based at the Nestl´e Headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland, reporting into the VP for
Nutrition, Health and Wellness and Sustainability within R&D, working to bring together
the science of sustainability and nutrition. I am responsible for developing tools that can
help drive forward the Nestl´e product portfolio and ways of working in terms of combining
nutrition and environmental impact. I am also responsible for coordinating a network of
sustainability champions across the global RD network in over 30 centres that help embed
sustainability into our products and processes at the earliest stage, encompassing the entire
value chain, from the farmer to the consumer. Previously I have held positions across Nestl´e
RD, including cocoa and health project manager and coordinator of long term science and
innovation for confectionery and beverages in the Nestl´e Research Centre in Lausanne, and
Sustainability Manager and Sugar Confectionery Group Leader the Nestl´e Product Technology Centre in York, UK. I hold a BSc in Human and Environmental Biology, an MSc
in Human Nutrition and a PhD in Nutrition from University of Ulster, as well as a post
graduate certificate in Sustainable Business from Cambridge University.
The interest in this workshop is the focus on food systems. Working in the food
industry, it is natural for us to consider the whole value chain, from the farmer to the
consumer and beyond. However linking nutrition and sustainability to address nutrition
security across this complexity is challenging and in order to ensure change in the right
direction, it is important to measure and understand the whole system which will require
collaboration, widely accepted tools and data sharing on a level not seen previously.
I hope that from this workshop, we gain more steps towards understanding how we
can work together to feed 9.6 billion people by 2050 within the boundaries of the planet.
The future of food is linked to every person on the planet having the physical and economic
access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food and water to fulfill dietary and cultural needs to
enable an active and healthy lifestylecompromising the ability of future generations to meet
these needs.
A.7 Engler, Hans
I grew up next door to my grandfather’s small farm and was trained as an applied
mathematician in Heidelberg, Germany (Ph.D. 1981). I have been at Georgetown University in Washington, DC since 1984, with stints at NSF and NOAA. My interests are in
applications of mathematics and statistics (including modern methods for data analysis) to
climate science, transportation, and generally sustainability. My colleague Hans Kaper and
I recently authored a textbook, “Mathematics and Climate”, which was published by SIAM
in 2013.
I am particularly interested in the interaction between global change (climate change,
population shifts) and food production and distribution (including nutrition and food justice). My methodological interests are in techniques for bridging scales that are informed
by mathematical approaches for physical systems and by statistical tools for data reduction.
I hope to contribute an appreciation of the potential of modern data collection techniques
(sensors, satellites, point-of-sales data) to this workshop.
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A.8 Etemadnia, Hamideh
Dr. Hamideh Etemadnia is currently a Travel Model Manager at the Denver Regional
Council of Governments (DRCOG), Denver, Colorado. She joined DRCOG in August 2014.
Dr. Etemadnia received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Southern Methodist University,
Dallas, TX in May 2011. She joined Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development at the
Pennsylvania State University as a post-doctoral research associate in March 2011. At Penn
State University she was working on Economic Research Service (USDAERS) cooperative
research agreement entitled Energy Use and Employment Impacts of a Healthier American
Diet: A U.S. Multiregional Assessment. She has received her Masters degree in Information
engineering from University of Ryukyus, Japan in 2004, and her Bachelor degree in Civil
Engineering from University of Tehran, Iran in 1999.
The active area of research is in designing optimal hub locations in food supply chain
system.
Population growth creates a challenge to food availability and access. To balance supply with growing demand, more food has to move from production to consumption sites.
Moreover, demand for locally-grown food is increasing and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) seeks to develop and strengthen regional and local food systems. Our research
examines wholesale facility (hub) locations in food supply chain systems to facilitate the
efficient transfer of food from production regions to consumption locations. It designs an
optimal wholesale or hub location network to serve food consumption markets through efficient connections with production sites. The mathematical formulation is a mixed integer
linear programming (MILP) problem that minimizes total network costs which include costs
of transporting goods and locating facilities. A scenario study is used to examine the models sensitivity to parameter changes, including travel distance, hub capacity, transportation
cost, etc. An application is made to the U.S. Fruit and Vegetable industry. We demonstrate
how parameter changes affect the optimal locations and number of wholesale facilities.
In our extended research we are thinking of considering the scale economies in production and distribution which will directly affect the shipping and handling cost. However,
the scale economies will introduce the non-linearity to the problem. We have encountered
a problem running the nonlinear MIP. The results go to ”0” which is not a desired output.
we have tried to look at the constraints and the objective function for the troubleshooting,
but no success yet. In this workshop I would like to get to know more researchers in this
area and exchange ideas. I would like to discuss the challenges we have in our modeling
methodology as well as new ideas and pursue the research in more collaborative manner
with multidisciplinary teams.
A.9 Fanzo, Jessica
I am an Assistant Professor of Nutrition in the Institute of Human Nutrition and
Department of Pediatrics at Columbia University in New York. I also serve as the Senior
Advisor of Nutrition Policy at the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development. I
guess you could call me a “card carrying nutritionist.” My current research focuses on the
interactions between food security, agriculture, nutrition and nutrition, and their implications
for improving maternal and child health in low-income countries. I particularly work in
conflict or post conflict countries. I am more and more involved in monitoring and evaluation,
along with surveillance and the indicators for the environment-agriculture-nutrition nexus
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are sparse. It would be great to see how better to measure, in an easy way, these important
linkages in the context of food systems.
A.10 Gustafson, Dave
I serve as Director for the ILSI Research Foundations Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security (CIMSANS), which fosters new public/private partnerships on novel food system modeling metrics, better informing adaptation
to the increasing impacts of climate change and resource scarcity on sustainable nutrition
security.
ILSI Research Foundation is a non-profit, public charitable organization with a mission
to improve environmental sustainability and human health by advancing science to address
real world problems. Established in 1984, the ILSI Research Foundation has long been
an international leader in building effective public-private partnerships by ensuring that its
programs are collaboratively developed and implemented with scientists from the private,
academic, government and non-governmental sectors. Adherence to this approach means
that the ILSI Research Foundations programs in nutrition, toxicology, risk assessment and
agriculture are informed and strengthened by the deliberate inclusion of international, multisectoral expertise and perspectives.
Formed in September 2012, the Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture and Nutrition Security (CIMSANS) is one of the ILSI Research Foundations three
centers. CIMSANS leads the Research Foundations work on fostering new public/private
partnerships on novel food system modeling metrics, better informing adaptation to the increasing impacts of climate change and resource scarcity on sustainable agriculture. As with
other ILSI centers, CIMSANS has quickly become an important global partner, engaging
hundreds of influential scientists among dozens of key organizations within academia, governments, and the private sector. Through a series of peer-reviewed publications, CIMSANS
has already helped release private-sector maize breeding trial data as Open Data and has
produced improved assessment methodologies for maize and other major row crops. CIMSANS has co-hosted a series of conferences with increasing levels of global impact, and is
currently engaged in a three-year effort to assemble the data, metrics, and improved modeling methods needed to conduct regional and global assessments of the impacts of climate
change on agriculture, food systems, and sustainable nutrition security.
A.11 Helfgott, Ariella
I have a background in mathematics, particularly stochastic modelling, system dynamics modelling and fuzzy cognitive maps. However, for the past decade I have been involved
in participatory planning and decision-aiding processes for building the resilience of human
and natural systems to environmental change. This includes participatory modelling. I will
be involved in this workshop as a facilitator not a participant. I currently work for the
University of Oxford Food Systems Research Group.
A.12 Hoyer-Leitzel, Alanna
My current postdoctoral research focuses on applying the ideas of resilience to mathematical models in climate and ecology. The application of resilience to the discussion of
food systems modeling is imperative. I am hoping to learn more about designing models
for complicated systems, how to bridge the gap from conceptual to mathematical models,
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and what the specific goals are for food systems that improve sustainable food and nutrition
security.
A.13 Ingram, John
I have been involved in food system research projects in the UK, Europe, south Asia,
southern Africa and the Caribbean, and have had substantial interaction with many international organisations, especially the UN-FAO and CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). I have also worked closely with national departments, agencies
and NGOs and businesses in the food sector, helping to establish research on the links between food security and environment through the analysis of food systems. I recently led
a project spanning UK business, government, researchers and other stakeholders to identify
research priorities for the UK food system; and am currently collaborating closely with the
public-private-academic Center for Integrated Modeling of Sustainable Agriculture Nutrition Security (CIMSANS) of the International Life Sciences Institute Research Foundation
(ILSI-RF).
My interest in the workshop is in developing a mathematically robust food system
model based on a range of conceptual models. But rather than combining existing submodels (e.g. models for crop growth with food chain logistics with consumer preferences)
which would be very challenging, or extending any of the existing sub models by adding
on further aspects, I am keen to see how we can develop a system model de novo. This
will require encompassing a range of world views on how the food system operates and the
flexibility in design to allow a range of stakeholder questions to be addressed.
A.14 Irfan, Mohammad
I am a visiting assistant professor of computer science and fellow in digital and computational studies at Bowdoin College. I did my PhD in computer science from the State
University of New York at Stony Brook in 2013. I am primarily interested in computational
game theory with applications to large-scale social and economic networks. I am excited
by the cross-disciplinary aspects of modeling real-world systems. At this workshop, I look
forward to getting exposed to multiple different perspectives on the issue of food security.
A.15 Jones, James
I am a biological and agricultural engineer and have about 40 years experience in
developing mathematical and computer simulation models of cropping systems, with a focus
on impacts of climate and management o food production. Because of the complexities of
cropping systems, I have also worked with entomologists, plant pathologists, hydrologists,
and economists to understand the dynamics of production systems and how to best manage
them for specific environments. I am now Co-PI of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison
and Improvement Project, which is a global network of agricultural system modelers who are
working to significantly improve our capabilities to predict climate and management impacts
and adaptation (see www.agmip.org). I have developed and used models at point to global
scales and taught graduate classes on concepts and methods for modeling such systems.
My interest in this workshop is in learning other critical components of food systems,
which encompass much more than the production aspects that I have modeled across scales.
As there is increasing demand for food and nutrition to feed nearly 10 billion people by
2050, the tools that we use to study them have to be inclusive to deal with the entire food
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chains, from production to consumption and waste management, taking into account water,
CO2, and energy footprints to assess sustainability. The models that I have developed and
used can contribute to this in some way, but it is not clear whether or not we need a new
generation of models that consider new approaches instead of re-cycling our older models.
Because of the broad range of disciplines and perspectives from academia and the
private sector, I hope to come away from the workshop with new ideas and opportunities to
contribute to a next generation of food system models that operate across scales to address
the challenges ahead.
A.16 Kaper, Hans
I am an applied mathematician interested in differential equations and dynamical systems. I spent most of my professional career at Argonne National Laboratory, focusing on
mathematical problems related to energy and finding interesting problems in fluid flow, chemistry, materials science, and other areas of physics and engineering. My current academic
affiliation is with Georgetown University, but my main activities are as co-director of the
“Mathematics and Climate Research Network” (MCRN, see http://www.mathclimate.org).
My current interest is in mathematical issues related to climate, sustainability, ecology,
biodiversity, and anything that is falls under the umbrella of “Mathematics of Planet Earth”
(MPE). I am co-author (with Hans Engler) of a textbook “Mathematics and Climate” and
co-editor (with Christiane Rousseau) of a collection of essays on “Mathematics of Planet
Earth,” both recently published by SIAM.
Our planet is under stress. As a society, we need to become aware of the limitations of
our life-support system and rethink our use of food, water, and energy. I am looking forward
to the workshop and hope to be able to identify new and interesting mathematical problems.
A.17 Libertini, Jessica
Greetings! I’m Jessica Libertini, an assistant professor of applied mathematics at
Virginia Military Institute. I started my career as a practicing engineer (General Dynamics)
and migrated into numerical methods for PDEs and applications. In recent years, I have
expanded my scope to include fields that have been of interest to my undergraduates as I
help them through research projects ranging from topology to network science. I have held
faculty positions at West Point, the University of Rhode Island, and now, Virginia Military
Institute.
My interest in this workshop stems from a personal concern about multiple aspects
of food including sustainability of production, security of distribution, diversity of product,
“health” issues related to food choices, the local and global economy of food, and environmental impact. I have dealt with food sensitivities my whole life, so I was learning to read
food labels while other children learned to read Dr. Suess. Thankfully, my body is far more
tolerant now, and I can enjoy a diverse diet, but those early childhood experiences left a
lasting impression. In 2009, I bought my first farm share and started a dialogue with my students about the impact of our food choices. My students rightfully pushed back, demanding
more evidence to back up my “hippy opinions” than I could offer. So, I started to “do my
homework”, and in 2013, I began teaching a general education level math modeling course
dedicated to food policy issues at the University of Rhode Island.
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I am interested in learning more about this topic at a level of depth beyond what I
acquired in developing my little course. I hope to get new ideas to bring back to the upperlevel undergraduate classroom as well as ideas for new research avenues for myself. Lastly,
I hope to develop productive professional relationships with the other participants - so I am
really looking forward to meeting all of you!
A.18 Lord, Steven
I have a PhD in pure mathematics, with postdoctoral experience in resilience, risk,
vulnerability, scenario futures and decision analysis. My recent role has been in the multidisciplinary strategic security risk analysis group in the Australian Defence Science and
Technology Organisation. Our group has equal focus on research and Australian Commonwealth government clients. We developed a systematic and graphical view of how threat
sources and drivers lead to impact (negative outcomes, the terminology in the risk domain is
that risk is uncertain impact to objectives), and, in the security context, the opportunities
to intervene to either lower the probability of security events or mitigate the consequences.
We applied it to airport improvised explosive device risk, complex infrastructure facility
physical security, insider threats, and eventually national security architectures through interaction with policy makers. My part in the team is to develop quantitative tools to aid
the analysis of complex and deeply uncertain systems. Deep uncertainty relates to lack of
knowledge about model structure (which model is best) and lack of knowledge of patterns
of variation (which distribution or stochastic process describes or predicts variation best). I
have learnt, adapted, or developed, uncertainty techniques in robust decision making, stochastic processes, extreme value theory, maximal entropy and probability theory, scenario
methodologies, multi-criteria optimisation, decision analysis to this end.
I am interested in contributing uncertainty analysis techniques to the workshop and
in interdisciplinary collaboration. Applying these techniques to examine improvements to
nutritional food systems would be an interesting problem to me because of the complexity in
the food system, the uncertainty in our knowledge about it, and the vector system dynamics
representation tracking nutritional value through the food system. Invariably analysis of
such complex and uncertain systems involves participatory methods and subjective opinion
elicitation. Our most recent research concerns subjective opinion elicitation that allows
analysis with full diversity in and across expert opinion. I am interested in applications of
this technique and applications of deep uncertainty system dynamics modelling.
I hope also to learn in the workshop about existing multi-scale modelling of the food
system and adapt uncertainty analysis to it. I have not been involved in really interesting
multi-scale modelling before and Id like to learn about it and see whats out there.
A.19 Meyer, Katherine
I am in my second year of graduate study in the University of Minnesota mathematics
PhD program. Under the guidance of my advisor Dick McGehee and in collaboration with
the Math Climate Research Network focus group led by Mary Lou Zeeman, I am researching
the mathematical meaning of resilience. Our work is inspired by work by ecologists and
environmental thinkers who offer the resilience paradigm as an alternative to maximumsustainable-yield thinking for managing socio-ecological systems. I majored in Biology at
Carleton College but decided to pursue mathematics because (1) I like it a lot and (2) I felt it
could be a valuable skill to contribute to interdisciplinary work on environmental problems.
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I’m interested in this workshop because it looks like a prime opportunity to engage
with multidisciplinary work. I don’t have much experience in collaborating across fields for
research yet, so I am interested in learning effective practices for mathematicians and subject
experts to communicate constructively. So far I’ve worked only with already-made models,
so learning about the modeling process will be valuable as well.
A.20 Nelson, Erik
I am an assistant professor of economics at Bowdoin College. My research interests
are the economics of biodiversity conservation, land use, ecosystem services, agriculture,
and climate change. I received my PhD from the Applied Economics department at the
University of Minnesota. Before coming to Bowdoin I had a 3-year Post Doc with the
Natural Capital Project. I have a research affiliation with the Centre for Environmental and
Climate Research at Lund University, Sweden.
I have started a project that looks at consumer preferences for organic fruit. I have
data from a longitudinal survey of 50,000 American households that tracks every grocery
store purchase they made from 2006 to 2012. For each item purchased the dataset includes
metadata on the item purchased, the date of purchase, the location of purchase, the amount
purchased, and the price paid. There is also socioeconomic data on each participating
household. From this I am looking to estimate the demand for organic fruit in the US, and
more specifically, price elasticity of demand for organic fruit.
If this research goes well it can be expanded to other organic items like vegetables,
milk, etc.
I am hoping this workshop will generate ideas to improve this research, to give me
ideas for other ways to use this data, and to inform me more generally in the math of food
and agriculture.
A.21 Nikolic, Igor
a) Your background dr. ir. Igor Nikolic is an Assistant Professor at the Energy and
Industry group, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management faculty, Delft University of
Technology. Trained as a chemical and bio-process engineer at the Delft University of Technology, he received his Cum Laude MSc degree, with an additional sustainable technology
certificate in 2001. After a number of years of working as an environmental scientist at the
Centre of Environmental Science (CML) in Leiden, he has joined the Energy and Industry
group at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at the TUD as a PhD candidate. He has received his PhD degree in 2009, with thesis work focused on the design of a
co-evolutionary method for constructing Agent Based Models of the evolution of Large Scale
Socio-Technical systems. He has spent half a year as a senior visiting research associate at
the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. He can be characterized as
a creative, multidisciplinary and out-of-the-box system thinking, applying Complex Adaptive Systems theory, Universal Darwinism and Agent Based Modeling to understanding and
shaping the co-evolution of socio- technical systems across a wide range of domains, focusing on the impacts of policies on the technical and social constituents of systems, always
aiming at improving the sustainability of these systems. Currently he is involved in a wide
array or research topics through industry and EU funded projects, ranging from smart-grids,
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regional industrial networks, e-waste markets, servicizing systems, flood protection and development aid. To these field he brings complex adaptive systems view and socio-technical
ABM perspective, as well as a strong methodological focus on model development.
b) Why you are interested in this workshop Food systems are Complex Adaptive Systems, spanning vast temporal, spatial and institutional scales. Their function is essential for
basic human survival, while their environmental, social and economic impact is tremendous.
Understanding and steering these systems through modeling is an immense challenge.
c) What you hope to get out of this workshop. I hope to connect with the mathematics
and food systems researchers more closely and establish long lasting research collaborations
in order to tackle this problem.
A.22 Schweizer, Vanessa
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Since 2006 I have focused on the systematic development of
long-term socio-economic or socio-technical scenarios in the context of climate change. Such
scenarios are important for understanding the human dimensions of climate change – both
how humans are vulnerable to changes in climate and how their economic activities may
drive climate change in the future. These dynamics function across multiple temporal and
geographic scales. I have used forecasting techniques in the traditions of both cross-impact
analysis and trend impact analysis to explore the implications of alternative futures and
conceptual models of complex multi-scale socio-technical systems. Previously, I have held
appointments with the Integrated Science Program at the National Center for Atmospheric
Research, the Climate Decision Making Center at Carnegie Mellon University, the Department of Environmental Sociology and Technology Assessment at the University of Stuttgart,
and the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change at the National Research
Council in the US. I hold a PhD in Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon
University, a Masters in Environmental Studies from The Evergreen State College, and a
BSc in Physics (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Nevada in Reno.
I am interested in this workshop because many of the multi-scale modelling challenges
for the food system also exist in the climate change context. Potentially I can bring some of
the lessons I have learned to modelling food systems and vice versa. Additionally I believe
that more mathematical tools could be brought to bear to multi-scale modelling and look
forward to getting the perspectives of mathematicians on these issues.
A.23 Stewart, Gavin
I am interested in the application of Bayesian Belief Networks and Hierarchical models
to ensure coherent propagation of uncertainty across the food system network. I believe
such models should be embedded firmly in the evidence-based paradigm with substantial
attention devoted to definition of outcomes and interrelationships between system components. Mechanisms for parameterising and validating the systems models need to be broad,
encompassing activities from expert elicitation through to meta-analysis. I am interested in
exploring all of these ideas and any alternatives addressing the “wicked” problem of food
security.
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A.24 Viens, Frederi
I am a professor of Statistics and Mathematics at Purdue University. My specialty is
stochastic analysis, a field of study at the intersection of probability theory and functional
analysis. Stochastic processes are useful to model complex systems with uncertainty and
time dynamics. I apply modeling with stochastic processes to a number of fields, including
quantitative finance, insurance, statistical inference, climate systems.
Recently I became interested in agricultural economics and their use of econ methodology to address sustainability questions involving agriculture. I am working with Purdue
colleagues on several related topics, including global food security (e.g. ensuring enough
food can be produced without overwhelming the natural systems). I attended a workshop
at Purdue in September in which the issue of complexity in modeling the food system came
up frequently. It is clear that more mathematical modeling is required to understand the
challenges our food system faces this century in feeding increased demand on a small planet,
hence my interest in this workshop.
The issue of uncertainty modeling in the global food system is barely being addressed.
I hope that my experience in this direction will be useful to the workshop participants,
and that I will learn of a number of new and promising quantitative ways to model the
complexities of the food system. One example of a critical question which must be answered:
given projections for demand driven by increasing wealth and increasing population, how
can agricultural productivity gains and public policy decisions ensure that demand can be
met while preserving biodiversity and being land-sparing? Some models can answer this
question, but the uncertainty bands often make it difficult to convince policy makers that
any decisions can be made with any level of confidence. I hope to help analyze and reduce
this uncertainty.
A.25 Wiebe, Keith
I am a Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in
Washington DC, where I lead a research program on Global Futures and Strategic Foresight with partners from across the CGIAR. Before joining IFPRI in 2013 I worked for the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, where I managed a program
of economic research and policy analysis for food security and sustainable development, and
helped coordinate preparation of FAOs annual flagship reports on the State of Food and
Agriculture and the State of Food Insecurity in the World. My background is in agricultural
economics, and my interests include land tenure, natural resource use and conservation, agricultural productivity and food security. I am interested in this workshop because we need
to understand the future of food and agriculture in the context of wider food systems, and
I’d like to learn how we can define food systems more precisely as the subject of analysis.