Get to know some of our staff and their work at the Global Academy of Agriculture & Food Systems. HTML Transcript: I'm Geoff Simm, I'm director of the Global Academy of Agriculture and Food Security here at the University of Edinburgh. My role is to help set the strategy for the Academy in our education and research programs and building partnerships both within the University and with external partners. So as a society we're dealing with huge challenges of feeding the growing population well and doing so in ways that are less damaging to the environment and which cope with our changing climate. These are immense challenges that really impact on all of us in society and trying to make a contribution to solving these is hugely motivating, and doing that through training students and through our research programs is the way that we hope to to make a difference. Like many of us I feel that resources on the planet at the moment are very unfairly distributed and it will be great to help contribute to a fairer distribution of those resources and to lifestyles and food systems that are far more respectful of the planet and the natural systems on which we depend and doing that through training a new generation of students and researchers is really central to our mission. I think balancing the needs to feed our population well, to protect natural systems, to deal with the challenges of climate change are huge, huge challenges and finding ways to navigate future paths that deal with all of those challenges simultaneously is the biggest challenge in this area and one in which we believe bringing people together from different disciplines within this university and the partners beyond is an absolutely key step. I really love teaching students and seeing them grow in confidence and knowledge over the years they're with us, I think training that next generation of students to go into the workplace, to go on into careers in research or business or policy is absolutely critical to tackling these major problems we face in society and that gives all of us here huge satisfaction. I also love interacting with partners and potential future partners in planning research programs which we hope will make a difference to meeting these challenges.
