Innovations in Crop Protection towards Sustainable Agriculture

Allan Watson completed MSci Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow from 1999 to 2004. He then received a PhD from the University of Strathclyde from 2004 to 2008. After Lindemann Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University from 2008 to 2010 with Prof. Sir D. W. C. MacMillan he completed Industrial postdoc at GlaxoSmithKline, Stevenage from 2010 to 2011. From October 2011 to November 2015 he was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde to becoming a senior Lecturer in November 2015 to December 2017. From January 2018 to July 2021 he was a reader in Homogeneous Catalysis at the University of St. Andrews where he is now a professor of Organic Chemistry.

Andrew Williams joined MoA in March 2023 as a Senior Fellow in Discovery Chemistry. A synthetic organic chemistry by training, Andrew brings over 30 years of pharmaceutical industry experience as a medicinal chemist and project leader, gained whilst at Eli Lilly. Specialising in the hit-to-lead, and especially in the lead-to-candidate phases of drug discovery, Andrew has led cross-functional project teams across multiple therapeutic areas, and has delivered more than 15 candidate molecules into clinical development. Andrew completed his D Phil studies at Oxford University, before undertaking post-doctoral research at the University of Minnesota.

Cara is the co-founder and CTO of SugaROx, a spinout company born from an academic research collaboration between Rothamsted Research and Oxford University. She is a plant molecular biologist and biochemist with expertise in plant carbon allocation, signalling and usage, with a particular emphasis on the role trehalose-6-phosphate (T6P) plays in these processes. Cara maintains active fundamental research at Rothamsted on the trehalose biosynthesis pathway in crops, and leads the R&D at SugaROx on the potential of T6P biostimulant use in multiple cropping systems, with a particular focus on yield improvement and drought stress resilience.

Fides Benfatti studied Chemistry at the University of Bologna in Italy, where she obtained her Master degree in 2004. The same year, she started in Bologna her PhD in the field of Medicinal Chemistry. After obtaining her PhD in 2008, Fides started her post-doctoral studies in the field of asymmetric catalysis, under the supervision of Professor P.G. Cozzi.
In 2012, after a second post doc at EPFL Lausanne in the group of Professor J. Waser, she joined Syngenta Crop Protection in Switzerland as Team Leader in Research Chemistry.
At Syngenta, Fides covered several roles, including Head of Insect control Lead Generation for 6 years and Head of Computational Chemical Design and Modelling. Since 2022 she is leading the Research Chemistry section which focuses on Insect and Disease control.

Giulio Volpin has a background in pharmaceutical chemistry and technology and has conducted graduate studies in the area natural products total synthesis. He is currently a Lab Leader in Process Research at Bayer AG, Crop Science Division, where his work focuses on route scouting and scale-up for novel crop protection active ingredients, as well as the advancement of digital chemistry and data science for chemical applications.

James Bull is a University Research Fellow and Reader in Synthetic Chemistry at Imperial College London. He obtained his undergraduate MSci degree from the University of Cambridge, then spent a year at GlaxoSmithKline. He returned to University of Cambridge to obtain his PhD under the supervision of Professor Steven Ley. In 2007 he joined the group of Professor André Charette as a postdoctoral fellow at Université de Montréal. He joined Imperial College London in 2009 as a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellow, and in 2011 was awarded an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship. In January 2016, he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He recently received the AstraZeneca prize for synthetic chemistry (2021). His research targets methods for the synthesis of biologically relevant chemical motifs.

Joachim Dickhaut is a chemist by training. After starting in pharmaceutical research, he moved to agrochemicals where he worked in since 1998. Since 2004 he is a member of insecticide research at BASF. While spending most of the time in early phase discovery, he is also one of the inventors of Fenmezoditiaz and led the project through the early phases. Additionally, Joachim has a strong interest in digitalization and led several projects in this area.

Peter Maienfisch is the founder and owner of CreInSol MCB, a company formed in April 2020. Previously he was Research Portfolio Manager Insect Control & Seedcare at Syngenta Crop Protection AG in Switzerland (until April 2020). In this role he was responsible to define the research strategies and to govern all insecticide, nematicide and seedcare research projects across technologies from their initiation to the delivery to development.
He is the inventor of thiamethoxam (Actara, Cruiser, one of the leading insecticides world-wide with annual sales of more than $1 billion) and championed the development of this innovative insecticide.

Thomas Stevenson received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1983, under the supervision of Nelson J. Leonard. After postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva in Switzerland from 1983 to 1985 with Wolfgang Oppolzer, Stevenson joined DuPont Crop Protection in 1985 as a research chemist, rising in ranks to DuPont Fellow. Upon his retirement in 2017, he joined FMC Agricultural Solutions as an FMC Fellow.
During his career he has proven to be a prolific inventor in the field of agricultural chemistry across insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. He holds over 80 issued United States patents and has presented over 120 lectures and posters at scientific meetings.