Brad R. Colman served as Director of Weather Strategy for Bayer/The Climate Corporation (retired 2022) where he oversaw and guided the design and execution of the Bayer global enterprise weather programs. Most recently, Colman served as President of the American Meteorological Society (AMS; 2023). Before joining Bayer/Climate, Colman worked on a new Microsoft consumer weather service team to consolidate and serve weather information across the entire Microsoft ecosystem. Previously, Colman had a diverse career with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) where he worked at The National Weather Service’s forecast office in Seattle, Washington; NOAA’s Environmental Research Laboratory; and was the Acting Director of NOAA’s Meteorological Development Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland. Colman is a member and Fellow of the AMS, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, co-chair of NOAA’s Science Advisory Board’s Environmental Information Services Working Group and a member of NOAA’s Science Advisory Board. He also serves as the chair of the National Academies Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. Colman received a B.S. in Earth sciences and mathematics from Montana State University and an Sc.D. in atmospheric sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Oren is the founder of the AI2 Incubator, and the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), which he led from 2013 to 2022, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington. A pioneer in applied AI, he has authored 200+ technical papers and founded multiple companies, including MetaCrawler, Farecast (acquired by Microsoft), and Decide.com (acquired by eBay). Oren has advised the White House, written for The New York Times and Nature, and shaped AI policy and research agendas globally. At the incubator, he helps founders bridge the gap between frontier research and commercial opportunity.

Dani Gelardi is the Senior Soil Scientist and Climate Coordinator at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, where she leads soil and climate efforts including the Washington Soil Health Initiative and Climate Resilience Planning for Washington Agriculture. She is also Adjunct Faculty at Washington State University in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences. Dani received her PhD in Soils and Biogeochemistry at UC Davis, as a Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) Fellow.

Ines Hanrahan, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission (WTFRC). She provides administrative leadership to the organization, oversight of the WTFRC staff, and contributes to strategic planning for the WTFRC. Ines strives to ensure all funding is geared towards investments in industry priority areas to enable increased productivity, improved product quality and to help growers stay economically viable in a globally competitive marketplace. She is committed to fostering vibrant public-private partnerships with tree fruit scientists worldwide, is highly dedicated to connecting with the next generation of industry professionals, both as a mentor and as an industry leader, and to setting a positive example for an increasingly diverse global work force. Her interest in farming is not only part of her roots, education, and work. Her family owns and operates a commercial tree fruit orchard in the Yakima valley that produces cherries, pears and apples. Ines received her Ph.D. in Horticulture from Washington State University.

Ananth Kalyanaraman is a Professor, Boeing Centennial Chair in Computer Science, and the Interim Director for the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University in Pullman. He is the Director of the NSF-USDA NIFA funded AgAID AI Institute for Transforming Workforce and Decision Support in agriculture. He holds a joint appointment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and affiliate faculty positions at the Molecular Plant Sciences Graduate Program and the Paul G. Allen School for Global Health. Ananth received his bachelors from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, India (B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering, 1998); and subsequently M.S. (Computer Science, 2002) and Ph.D. (Computer Engineering, 2006) from Iowa State University.

Ananth works at the intersection of parallel computing, graph analytics, and bioinformatics/computational biology. His focus is on developing algorithms and software for scalable analysis of large-scale data from various scientific domains and particularly agriculture, plant and life sciences. Research in his lab has been supported by various funding sources including the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Ananth is a recipient of U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Award, and his student-led research works have received multiple conference best paper awards and a prestigious graph challenge award. Ananth serves/has served on the editorial boards of several reputed journals (including TPDS, TCBB, JPDC, ParCo), and also regularly serves in various capacities including organizational capacities at various conferences in the areas of parallel processing and bioinformatics. He is currently serving as a Vice-Chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Parallel Programming (TCPP). Ananth is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM and SIAM.

Amy McGovern is the Director of the National Science Foundation Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). AI2ES is a convergent, multi-sector NSF Trustworthy AI institute led by the University of Oklahoma that brings together researchers in AI, atmospheric science, ocean science, and risk communication to create novel trustworthy AI techniques that improve our ability to understand, predict, and communicate high-impact weather. She is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society and member of the National Academies Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. McGovern received a B.S. in math and computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Andrew Nelson is a fifth-generation farmer and a software engineer who runs Nelson Farms, Inc. and Silver Creek Farms, Inc. in the Palouse region of eastern Washington, USA. He produces wheat, garbanzo beans, peas, lentils, canola, and barley on 7,500 acres of land. He is also a software engineer at University of Washington, a consultant for Ag Tech startups, and an early adopter of new technologies such as drones and sensors to improve efficiency, reduce input costs and boost yields on his farm. He has conducted hundreds of experiments and pilots with various technologies to optimize his farming operations and make better management decisions. He is passionate about precision agriculture and sustainability and believes that technology is the key to profitability and environmental stewardship.

Derek I. Sandison was appointed Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) director in June 2015, where he continues to strengthen both Washington’s food and agriculture systems nationally and internationally. In the agriculture industry and beyond, he applies a solution-oriented approach to issues. Along with serving as director of WSDA, Derek currently serves on the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Executive Board as the Second Vice President. He is also the immediate past president for the Western United States Agricultural Trade Association (WUSATA). A lifelong Washington resident, Sandison has worked in the private and public sectors for over 49 years. Before his appointment with the WSDA, he served as director of the state’s Office of Columbia River (OCR) within the Department of Ecology between 2008 and 2015. During that time, he developed and laid the groundwork for the future development of new large-scale water projects for cities, farms, and fish. Prior to his service with OCR, he was the Central Regional Director for the Department of Ecology. Sandison has a Master of Science in natural resource management and a bachelor’s degree in biological science, both from Central Washington University.

Brad Zamft is the CEO of Heritable Agriculture, which combines artificial intelligence, environmentally-sensitive breeding, and gene editing to drive down costs, accelerate the time-to-market, and unlock expansive, high-value market opportunities in the agriculture industry. Prior to Heritable, Brad worked at X, the “Moonshot Factory” of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, where he conceived, initiated, and led the project that would later spin out as Heritable. Prior to Heritable, Brad was the Chief Scientific Officer of TL Biolabs – a startup aimed at DNA diagnostics for the cattle industry. Prior to TL Biolabs Brad made and managed grant programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E). Brad received his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research in synthetic biology at Harvard Medical School under the guidance of Prof. George Church.