Contributing Author Biographies | Aquaculture

Valentin Abe, Ph.D.  Executive Director, Caribbean Harvest Foundation.  Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Dr. Valentin Abe is the Executive Director of the Caribbean Harvest Foundation.  A native of the Ivory Coast  and a Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Abe earned his Ph.D. in Aquaculture from Auburn University in 1995.  Relocating to Haiti in 1997, he began an Aquaculture Development Program.  In 2005, he started Caribbean Harvest and the Caribbean Harvest Foundation, a non-profit Haitian charitable institution that seeks to not only create thousands of job, but also improve the daily lives of people by bringing adequate housing, food, water, and education to their destitute villages.  Dr. Valentin Abe has spent more than 10 years developing a process for large scale production of tilapia to establish commercial fish farms in Haiti.  He is globally recognized as one of the most effective leaders making a difference in Haiti.  Dr. Abe has been chosen as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most influential People in 2010 and the 2011 Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year  in Haiti.

Malcolm Beveridge, Director of Aquaculture and Genetics at the WorldFish Center

Malcolm Beveridge is Director of Aquaculture and Genetics at the WorldFish Center. he has a PhD in ecology from the University of Glasgow, UK. He works with colleagues and partners to determine how to reduce poverty and hunger through improving aquaculture and fisheries.

Dave Conley, M.Sc. | Senior Consultant and Founding Partner of the Aquaculture Communications Group (ACG)

Dave Conley is a Senior Consultant and Founding Partner of the Aquaculture Communications Group (ACG). His career in aquaculture grew out of his interests and training in agriculture, renewable resources development, and parasitology. He has over 40 years of diverse practical experience in food and fibre production, research, journalism, public policy development, public education, and communications. From 1999 to 2004 Dave served as Communications and Policy Advisor to Canada’s first and only Commissioner for Aquaculture Development at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and was part of the team that produced two strategic policy documents for the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans – Achieving the Vision, 2003, and Recommendations for Change, 2003. Dave joined the Board of Directors of Aquaculture without Frontiers (AwF) in 2010 and was appointed Executive Director in August 2011 and served in that position until June 2013. He holds an M.Sc. in Parasitology from the Institute of Parasitology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and a B.Sc. (Agr.), Renewable Resources Development, from the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, McGill University. He also holds a Diploma in Agriculture, Farm Business Management, from Kemptville College, University of Guelph.

Daniel Fairweather,

Daniel started his professional career as a fish biologist, before moving into the insurance industry in 2000 as an aquaculture claims and placing broker. After a few years broking, Dan moved into underwriting, where he became the senior underwriter at RSA before moving to the Global Aquaculture Insurance Consortium. He is now the Director of Aquaculture at Willis, supporting aquaculture clients globally. As well as insurance placements Willis are also developing a number of value added risk services to assist clients to identify, monitor and ultimately control risk.

Dr. Chadag V Mohan, Research and Development Program Manager of NACA

Dr CV Mohan is the present Research and Development Program Manager of NACA. Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia Pacific, an intergovernmental organizations of 18 member governments in Asia Pacific. He received his PhD from the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, UK in 1990 in the area of aquatic animal pathology. Since 1982, he has been involved with aquatic animal health and aquaculture teaching and research at the College of Fisheries, Mangalore, India. In December 2000, he became Professor of Fish Pathology at the same institute. In March 2003, Dr Mohan was appointed as the Coordinator of Aquatic Animal Health Program of NACA and has been instrumental in managing the regional aquatic animal health program in 21 countries of the Asia-Pacific region.  As R&D Manager of NACA since Feb 2009, he manages the regional R&D program. His expertise includes aquatic animal health management, fish and shrimp pathology, epidemiology, surveillance and risk management, responsible and sustainable small-scale aquaculture, development and implementation of better management practices, farmer group and aquaculture certification. He has several years of teaching, research and development experience and has authored and co-authored over 110 papers. He is the present Chairperson of the Fish Health Section (FHS) of the Asian Fisheries Society (AFS).

Duncan Perrin, Risk Management Surveyor & Survey Coordinator at Sunderland Marine Mutual Insurance Company Limited

Duncan Perrin graduated from Sparsholt College Hampshire in 1995, with a Higher National Diploma in Fish Farming and Fishery Management and accepted a position with Marine Harvest McConnell at their Research & Development facility at Lochailort, Scotland.  After two years he moved into the Health Department as Freshwater Health Manager.  In 2000, Duncan graduated from the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling with a Masters Degree in Aquaculture and has been employed by Sunderland Marine Mutual Insurance Company Ltd in their technical department of Aquaculture Risk Management ever since.  As part of the global risk management team he is responsible for the assessment of aquaculture risks and the provision of technical support to the company’s Members.

Dr Steef Peters,  co-founder of Water Insight and co-founder of BlueLeg Monitor.

Steef has a PhD in hydrology and is specialized in remote sensing of evapotranspiration and water quality. He has almost 20 years experience in deriving water quality information from optical measurements. Steef was coordinator of the European FP5 project REVAMP and is coordinator of the FP7 projects CoBiOS and GLaSS. At Water Insight he and co-owner Marnix Laanen developed the prize winning  WISP-3  system, a handheld spectrometer for close monitoring purposes.

Marco Pieters, co-founder of BlueLeg Monitor

Marco is co-founder of BlueLeg Monitor, a Dutch company that has developed satellite and in situ water quality information services for among others the aquaculture sector.

Marco has a Master in Agricultural Economics from Wageningen University, has over 15 years venture capital /venture development experience. After graduation worked in the food industry, and consecutively at a World Bank financed venture capital fund in Latin America and at Gilde’s Food & Agribusiness Technology Fund.  For the last 12 years he has been active in developing several clean tech ventures, taking in particular new clean technologies to the market.

Michael Phillips, Senior Scientist at WorldFish

Michael Phillips is Senior Scientist with the Aquaculture and Genetics Discipline at WorldFish. He received a Ph.D. in Aquaculture and Fish Behaviour in 1982 from the University of Stirling, UK, and has been involved with research and development on various aspects of Asian aquaculture and aquatic systems since 1985, with additional experience in the Americas, Africa and the Pacific. Research interests include sustainable aquaculture, aquatic systems, environmental impacts and management, pro-poor farmer institutions, connecting small-scale producers to markets and, most recently, research on business innovations and financing for investment into SME aquaculture enterprises.

Wayne Rogers, Director of Corporate Services at WorldFish

Wayne Rogers is Director of Corporate Services at WorldFish. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and has spent most of his career in the private sector with experience mainly in the information technology, energy and manufacturing sectors coupled with a considerable amount of time spent working in developing countries. His business experience includes participation in a successful management buyout and the establishment of several successful startup enterprises. Since joining WorldFish he has become increasing interested in the development of SMEs that benefit small-scale producers.

Mark Vos, Registered Expert in industrial loss adjusting atCrawford & Company

Mark Vos is a Registered Expert in industrial loss adjusting at Crawford & Company a US company represented in 67 countries and employs 10,000 personnel. The last 10 years he is involved to develop the aquaculture services and has been selected as global practice leader Aquaculture since 2006.

Mark Vos joined the Crawford & Company Global Technical Advisory Board for Global Technical Adjusters in 2003. In 2009 he was appointed as an Executive Member of the Global Council of the Crawford Global Technical Services service that covers losses of over USD 500,000.In 2013 he was appointed as Regional managing Director Central Eastern Europe & Eurasia as well to manage the transition to the future.

Valeska Weymann, GLOBALG.A.P. Standard Management Aquaculture

Valeska graduated as Food Engineer from the State University of Campinas in Brazil, and completed additional studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Germany at the Tropic Technology Centre and at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom – Sustainable Aquaculture. With broad agricultural and food industry experience, she also served as the deputy director for the Cleaner Production Centre UNIDO project in Guatemala. She has fulfilled a range of duties at GLOBALG.A.P. since 2002, supporting crops, flower and compound feed standard developments and direct involvement with tea, coffee and aquaculture standards. She joined the aquaculture standard development since it began in 2003.