Visiting Staff

Dr Peter Amer

Managing Director of AbacusBio

An expert on global beef, sheep and dairy breeding, Peter has had extensive input into the development of economic indexes that drive the direction of genetic progress for a very wide range of agricultural industries around the world. He works collaboratively to support and develop new researchers so that they have the skills required to deploy novel solutions to complex breeding programme problems including complex issues with adoption and farmer acceptance. Peter is able to leverage a very diverse background of experiences having lived and studied in 6 different countries, and collaborated in research and application programmes across plants and animals from highly intensive industrialised farming systems to smallholder systems in developing countries.    

Isabelle Baltenweck

Program Leader: Policies, Institutions and Livelihoods

Isabelle Baltenweck is a development economist with twenty years of post-doctoral experience in agricultural systems in Africa, South and South-East Asia, with a focus on livestock value chains. Starting her career as a development economist with an emphasis on adoption and impact assessment studies in livestock systems, she has increasingly sharpened her skills in gender and social equity research, looking at how women and men’s needs and capabilities differ in terms of accessing and using technologies and practices, also resulting in varied, and sometimes opposite, impact. She has worked at the interface of research and development, working with private sector, farmers’ groups, ministries, NGOs and investors. Her work has a direct relevance to the activities of development practitioners and the private sector, and resulted in publications targeted at that audience.

Prof. Luís Barioni

Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow (RSWVF) and Vet School honorary Professor

Prof Luís Barioni is a Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow (RSWVF) and a Vet School honorary Professor, visiting GAAFS in 2024. He works for Embrapa Digital Agriculture (Brazil), at the Agri-Environmental Modelling Laboratory. His research focuses on animal production and its interactions with climate change (mitigation, vulnerability, and adaptation) with an emphasis on mathematical modelling, simulation and optimization of agricultural systems, and development of decision-making support systems. At GAAFS,  Prof Luis is working on his RSWVF funded project “Optimizing protocols for agricultural soil carbon monitoring and prediction based on the value of information”. He also leads several initiatives focusing on closing the gap between science and policy with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, and with the industry. The latter currently represented by the ProCarbon project, a collaboration with Bayer seeking to bolster carbon farming initiatives, including improved monitoring tools and more reliable protocols for carbon credits validation.

Dr Lilia Bliznashka

Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute

Lily is an interdisciplinary researcher with expertise in global health and nutrition, impact evaluation, and quantitative methods. Her focus is on assessing the effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions and understanding how they work to improve women’s and children’s health, nutrition, and wellbeing. Lily’s expertise extends to early childhood development, including using qualitative and quantitative methods to design novel approaches to improve early childhood development in agricultural contexts. She has on-going projects in Malawi, Tanzania, India, Yemen, and Somalia. Lily holds a PhD in Population Health Science from Harvard University. Her publications are available on Google Scholar

Dr Tim Byrne

Managing Director, AbacusBio International

Tim is an experienced and solution-focus applied scientist. Over the last 15 years, he has developed, delivered, and reviewed agri-technology programs in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, United Kingdom, North America, and China. His strengths are in the economic evaluation of technologies in the red meat and dairy supply chains, especially in data/ information programmes and genetic improvement technologies in farmed livestock. A broad and in-depth knowledge of agriculture and food production supply chains globally is underpinned by practical farming experience and a PhD from Otago University, New Zealand; this enables Tim to see investment and technology opportunities and integrate them to increase returns and add capital value to businesses.

Dr Amelia Finaret

Associate Professor of Global Health and Economics

Amelia B. Finaret is a food economist and a dietitian. She teaches and conducts research on child nutrition, dietary quality and the linkages between agriculture and nutrition. Her work addresses the data quality and data errors in large-scale nutrition and public health survey datasets, measurement challenges, and causal inference in the field of nutrition. Dr. Finaret has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Stony Brook University, an M.S. in Agricultural Economics from Iowa State University, and a PhD from the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. She is credentialed as a Registered Dietitian (RD) from the Council for Dietetic Registration (CDR) in the United States. Dr. Finaret was a Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2013 to 2015. Her textbook with William A. Masters was published Open Access from Palgrave MacMillan in 2024 - Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health.

Dr Birte Lindstrøm Nielsen

Research Director at the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) and the Humane Slaughter Association (HSA)

Birte is Research Director at the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) and the Humane Slaughter Association (HSA), two international scientific and educational animal welfare charities and membership organisations. Dr Nielsen is an internationally renowned scientist who has contributed significantly to our knowledge on the behaviour and welfare of animals, with a special emphasis on farmed species.

Birte studied agricultural science at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, followed by a PhD in ethology at The University of Edinburgh. She previously held senior research roles in Aarhus University, Denmark (assessing farm animal welfare through research in basic and applied ethology, as well as stress physiology) and INRAE, France (olfaction, behaviour, and neuroscience) before returning to the UK in 2020

Guyo Roba

Head of the Jameel Observatory

Guyo Roba is the Head of the Jameel Observatory at the International Livestock Research Institute. Before joining ILRI, Guyo held several positions at diverse national and international organizations such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA). He is a natural resource scientist and a livestock market specialist by training, with over 12 years of professional experience in natural resources and drylands management and livestock value chain development. He is well grounded in rural development and food security subjects. Guyo holds a PhD in agricultural sciences from Universität Kassel, Germany, a master’s degree in energy studies from the University of Dundee, UK, and a bachelor’s in environmental planning and management from Kenyatta University, Kenya.