RESHAPING AGRICULTURE FOR BETTER NUTRITION –
The Agriculture, Food, Nutrition, Health Nexus

13-14 August 2018, Canberra

Keynote Listeners

Our Keynote Listeners play an integral role in summarising and communicating key take home messages from our conference. They attend every session, develop a succinct summary of the presentations, and write a report that we distribute within a few days of the conference.

To deliver this initiative, we are ably supported by our RAID program (Researchers in Agriculture for International Development) – the Australia-based network that brings together early to mid-career researchers with an interest in agriculture and international development.

RAID is also an integral part of our conference scholar program, assisting with our scholar activities and mentoring some of the scholars. Most of our conference scholars go on to be members of RAID if they haven’t already found the network.

Some of our RAID keynote listeners this year are former conference scholars who have maintained their interest in agricultural research for development and are all active international researchers.

This year’s Keynote Listeners were:

Madaline Healey studied a Bachelor of Agricultural Science at Melbourne University and a PhD in thrips ecology at CQU before heading off to Laos as a volunteer and then mentor in our plant pathology and mentoring activities there. On returning to Australia in 2015, Madaline started working at the University of the Sunshine Coast on ACIAR projects in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Her interests are integrated pest management, biological control and all things veggies. A short video on Madaline’s time in Laos as a volunteer in our biosecurity work is here.

Rebecca Cotton was a Crawford Fund conference scholar from the University of the Sunshine Coast in 2016 and is now a Graduate Research Officer at ACIAR based in Canberra and an active RAID member. Becs B.Sc. majored in sustainability. She then completed her honours thesis on improving agricultural extension based in Fiji and the Cook Islands. Bec spent 3 months in the Islands conducting research with the subsistence and small holder farmers. A reflection by Bec on research and field work is in her RAID blog here.