The Center for Science, Technology, and Society, The Food an Agribusiness Institute, and the High Tech Law Institute is proud to host Richard Jefferson, CEO of Cambia. Dr. Jefferson has been named by Scientific American to the List of the World’s 50 most influential technologists. You can learn more about Dr. Jefferson and Cambia on their website. Dr. Jefferson will be speaking from 5:00pm – 6:00pm at SCU’s Nobili Hall, with a short reception to follow from 6:00pm – 6:30pm.
ABOUT RICHARD JEFFERSON
Born in California, Richard graduated from the College of Creative Studies of the University of California. He received his PhD in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado, followed by an NIH fellowship in Cambridge where he conducted the world’s first field release of a transgenic food crop, and created and distributed amongst the most widely cited and licensed enabling technologies in the life sciences. After working with the FAO of the United Nations as Senior Molecular Biologist he founded Cambia in Canberra, Australia in 1991.
Richard has worked and taught extensively worldwide, supporting the Rockefeller Foundation’s biotechnology network for over a decade, and has been an advisor to many UN Agencies and the CGIAR. He has been profiled in media including The Economist, Newsweek, Nature Biotechnology, Science, New Scientist, Wired, and Red Herring. Cambia’s work has recently featured in cover editorials in many major life sciences journals.
In 2003 Richard was named by Scientific American to the List of the World’s 50 most influential technologists, cited as the World Research Leader for 2003 for Economic Development. In 2005 Richard was awarded the Leadership in Science: Public Service Award by the American Society of Plant Biologists. For the last decade Richard has been an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur of the Schwab Foundation, for which he is a regular panelist at the Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum. In 2009, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Richard became Professor of Science, Technology & Law at the Queensland University of Technology, and Founding Director of the Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI). In 2010 he was awarded the inaugural CSPO Prize Medal by the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes (CSPO).
ABOUT CAMBIA
Cambia is an autonomous international non-profit social enterprise that creates new strategies and tools to bring efficiency and equity to life-sciences enabled innovation. For almost two decades Cambia has been inventing, distributing and supporting new enabling biotechnologies for use in systems-based agriculture and life sciences worldwide, which are now used in thousands of labs around the world. Increasingly Richard’s research has focused on the microbial populations as part of the hologenome and his hologenome theory of evolution that informs systems-based strategy for agriculture, environment and health interventions.
Cambia developed the BiOS Initiative (www.bios.net) – the biological open source movement in response to increasing science and technology complexity, patent thickets and innovation system inefficiencies. The BiOS Initiative created the first patent-based commons mechanism for science-enabled innovation. Cambia has continued to be the trendsetter in new thinking about patents, collaboration and public good. As part of this work, Cambia created the Patent Lens, (www.patentlens.net), now the pre-eminent independent public, global open access resource for increasing patent transparency, which has formed the basis for the new CambiaLens platform for innovation cartography.
This is a free event and registration is not necessary.