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Howard-Yana Shapiro

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Howard-Yana Shapiro is Chief Agricultural Officer & Mars Fellow at Mars, Inc. Howard has been involved with resilient 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. His academic career spanned 15 years. Shapiro is a Senior Fellow at UC Davis, College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, a Distinguished Fellow of the World Agroforestry Centre and Science Advisor MIT-Media Lab. He served as Chairperson of the Board of the Agriculture Sustainability Institute at UC Davis for a decade. He led the global effort sequencing, assembling and annotating the Theobroma cacao genome, and initiated the Arachis genome. Shapiro founded the African Orphan Crops Consortium (AOCC) and the African Plant Breeding Academy (AfPBA) in 2011. The effort will sequence, assemble and annotate 101 key food cultivars, which are the backbone of African nutrition and train 150 mid-career plant breeders in modern breeding technology.

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