SPEAKERS

Michael Rogers is a best-selling author, technology pioneer and futurist, who most recently served as futurist-in-residence for The New York Times. He has worked with companies ranging from FedEx, Boeing and NBCUniversal to Microsoft, Pfizer and Siemens, focusing on how companies can think about the future in useful ways. He speaks to audiences worldwide and is a regular guest on radio and television

Rogers began his career as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. He co-founded Outside magazine and then launched Newsweek’s technology column, winning numerous journalism awards. For ten years he was vice president of The Washington Post Company's new media division, leading both the newspaper and Newsweek into the new century and earning patents for multimedia technology. He is also a best-selling novelist whose books have been published worldwide, chosen for the Book-of-the-Month club and optioned for film.

Rogers studied physics and creative writing at Stanford University, with additional studies in finance and management at the Stanford Business School Executive Program. He lives in New York City and is currently working on book and television projects.

Lu Ann Williams is co-founder and Director of Innovation at Innova Market Insights, a global market research firm headquartered in The Netherlands’ Food Valley. She manages a network of industry professionals and trend scouts in 70+ countries that contribute to Innova’s proprietary market intelligence platform and an analyst team that works with food, beverage, ingredient and packaging companies on product development, marketing and strategy. She is originally from Augusta, GA and has lived in The Netherlands for the past 25 years.

James Kennedy is a British chemistry teacher and passionate chemistry spokesperson. He founded the chemistry outreach initiative Sincerely, Chemicals in 2017 and published Fighting Chemophobia in 2018.
Since graduating from the University of Cambridge with a Master’s degree in Natural Sciences in 2010, he has pursued a passion for science communication and science outreach by using festivals, lectures, seminars, conferences, posters and T-shirts to make chemistry more open and accessible for the public. He is a vocal pro-chemistry advocate who writes articles online and speaks in radio and podcast interviews. James' first published book, Fighting Chemophobia, stemmed from a need for people to understand and cure chemophobia by seeing chemicals in a more rational light. He has been teaching for 8 years and researching chemophobia for 3 years. He lives with his wife and daughter in Melbourne, Australia.

Joanna Drake serves as General Counsel to FEMA. With more than a decade of flavor industry experience, her work with the association has covered a variety of regulatory and legal issues, including flavor and finished product labeling. Ms. Drake has given presentations to FEMA and other organizations on the current labeling implications of flavor, anticipated federal administrative action regarding “natural” labeling and the litigation landscape involving ingredient and food labeling. Prior to joining FEMA, she served as Assistant Counsel to WILD Flavors, Inc., where she worked on a variety of transactional issues and provided strategic legal counsel on product labeling and compliance matters.

Dr. Thomas Hofmann currently serves as the director of the new Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as well as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. His research, published in more than 300 papers, centers around odor and taste systems chemistry. A decorated scientist, Dr. Hofmann is a founding board member for the European Institute of Technology Knowledge & Innovation Community.