Sara Menker | |
|---|---|
 Menker in 2017 | |
| Born | |
| Alma mater | Mount Holyoke College Columbia University |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Employer | Gro Intelligence |
| Awards | Young Global Leaders |
Sara Menker is an Entrepreneur and the former CEO of Gro Intelligence, a company that uses artificial intelligence to forecast agricultural and climate trends. [1] She is a trustee of the Mandela Institute for Development Studies and was elected one of the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders.
Menker grew up in Ethiopia. [2] Her parents were middle class and she attended a private school in Addis Ababa. [2] In her time in Ethiopia, she was exposed to the effects of poverty and famine.
During her high school career, she met an admissions officer from Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, [2] which she ultimately decided to attend. There, she got her degree in Economics and African Studies. [3] She later attended the London School of Economics for graduate studies and received her master's degree at Columbia University. [4]
Menker started her career in commodities risk management at Morgan Stanley. [5] She eventually moved through Morgan Stanley to portfolio trading and management. [5] Throughout her work at Morgan Stanley, the issue of food insecurity was constantly on her mind. During her time there, Menker became interested in farmland investments. [3] She left her job in Wall Street in 2014 to use her skills in data analytics for social good. [6] So, she founded Gro Intelligence, a company that leverages artificial intelligence to forecast agricultural trends. [1]
She became concerned by threat of a global food crisis, and started to investigate how Africa could mitigate the Earth's growing demands for food. [7] She estimated that by 2030 food shortages could be as significant as the financial crisis or dot-com bubble crash. [3] Menker predicts that the world could face a 214 trillion calorie deficit. [8] This is due to systemic issues in the food supply chain, as well as a general increase in population. [2] In 2014 Menker established Gro Intelligence, a data-driven platform which connects food market around the world. [3] [9] [10] Gro Intelligence includes information such as the cost of avocado exports from Mexico and popular coffee beans, and uses artificial intelligence to make predictions about trends in food prices. [11] [3] Gro Intelligence offer software that attempts to make agricultural, weather and climate data easy to understand. The data is combined with satellite imagery and creates over 1,000 models a day. [12] She has used Gro Intelligence to investigate the impact of natural disasters, including droughts, on food supply. [13] The reports inform companies on what and where to sell products, as well as supporting policy makers and insurance companies. [13]
In 2017 Menker delivered a TED talk A global food crisis may be less than a decade away, which has been watched over 1.5 million times. [14] [4] In 2018 Menker was named the Henry C. Gardiner Global Food Systems Lecturer. [15] [16] She has presented at the Rockefeller Foundation, X and The New York Times. [17] [18] [19]
Menker is a trustee of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture and the Mandela Institute for Development Studies. She was selected by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader in 2014. [20] She is also a member of The Aspen Institute African Leadership Initiative. [21] Menker is involved with Cognition X, the artificial intelligence information platform. [22] In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time 's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. [23] In 2021, Menker was selected as a Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst. [24]
In February 2024, Menker was replaced as CEO of Gro Intelligence [25] and in May 2024, the company announced it was closing down. [26]
The world economy or global economy is the economy of all humans in the world, referring to the global economic system, which includes all economic activities conducted both within and between nations, including production, consumption, economic management, work in general, financial transactions and trade of goods and services. In some contexts, the two terms are distinct: the "international" or "global economy" is measured separately and distinguished from national economies, while the "world economy" is simply an aggregate of the separate countries' measurements. Beyond the minimum standard concerning value in production, use and exchange, the definitions, representations, models and valuations of the world economy vary widely. It is inseparable from the geography and ecology of planet Earth.
Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), also known as AgBank, is one of the "Big Four" banks in China. It was founded on 10 July 1951, and has its headquarters in Dongcheng District, Beijing. It has branches throughout mainland China, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, New York, Frankfurt, Sydney, Seoul, and Singapore.
Mary Meeker is an American venture capitalist and former Wall Street securities analyst. Her primary work is on Internet and new technologies. She is the founder and general partner at BOND, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm. She previously served as partner at Kleiner Perkins.
Tom Glocer is an American business executive and the former CEO of Thomson Reuters and Reuters.
James Patrick Gorman is an Australian-American businessman and financier. He has been executive chairman of Morgan Stanley since 2012, and was CEO of the firm from 2010 through 2023. Before becoming CEO, he was the co-president and co-head of strategic planning at the firm.
Tomas J. Philipson is a Swedish-born American economist who served as the Acting Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump administration. He departed from the position and the Council at the end of June, 2020, to return to the University of Chicago. He holds the Daniel Levin Chair in Public Policy at the University of Chicago, with posts in the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, Department of Economics, and the Law School. He was a Director of the Becker Friedman Institute at the university.
The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, distribution, and disposal of food and food-related items. It also includes the inputs needed and outputs generated at each of these steps. Food systems fall within agri-food systems, which encompass the entire range of actors and their interlinked value-adding activities in the primary production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as in food storage, aggregation, post-harvest handling, transportation, processing, distribution, marketing, disposal, and consumption. A food system operates within and is influenced by social, political, economic, technological and environmental contexts. It also requires human resources that provide labor, research and education. Food systems are either conventional or alternative according to their model of food lifespan from origin to plate. Food systems are dependent on a multitude of ecosystem services. For example, natural pest regulations, microorganisms providing nitrogen-fixation, and pollinators.
Alison Fitzgerald Kodjak is an American journalist and currently works for the Associated Press as its Washington investigations editor. She previously reported for the AP from 1997 to 2000. She formerly worked for National Public Radio, where she led the science desk, the Center for Public Integrity, and at Bloomberg News for 10 years, and has also worked as a reporter for newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer. She is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, one of journalism's most prestigious honors.
Zevia is a Los Angeles based company that produces soft drinks, organic tea, energy drinks, and mixers sweetened with stevia. All Zevia products are zero-calorie, sugar-free, gluten free, vegan, certified kosher, and certified by The Non-GMO Project. In June 2021, Zevia filed to go public with an IPO.
Ruth Porat is a British–American business executive who has been chief financial officer of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google since 2015. Prior to joining Google, Porat was the Chief Financial Officer of Morgan Stanley from January 2010 to May 2015.
Laurette T. Koellner is an American business executive, the former president of Boeing International.
Greenhill & Co., Inc. is an American investment banking advisory firm founded in 1996 by Robert F. Greenhill. The firm provides advice on significant mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, financings, and capital raisings to leading corporations, partnerships, institutions and governments across a number of industries. Since its inception, Greenhill has advised on transactions valued at close to $3 trillion.
Alexandra Mousavizadeh is a Danish economist and CEO of Evident. Prior to June 2022 she was a partner at Tortoise Media in London and creator of The Responsibility100 Index and The Global AI Index. She specializes in index creation, using data to build benchmarks that rank nations, companies and other entities on key social and technological issues. A former sovereign risk analyst at Moody's and co-head of country risk management at Morgan Stanley, she is also the former CEO of Arc Ratings, and the former director of the Prosperity Index, a ranking of the prosperity of more than 140 countries published annually by the London-based Legatum Institute.
Morning Consult is an American business intelligence company established in 2014. It was named one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America by Deloitte in both 2018 and 2019 and was valued at more than one billion dollars in June 2021. The company specializes in online survey research technology and has offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco.
Thomas C. Naratil is an American business executive in the financial industry. After serving as president of both UBS Wealth Management Americas and UBS Americas since early 2016, Naratil was appointed CEO of UBS Americas Holding LLC and became co-president of Global Wealth Management of UBS Group AG and UBS AG in early 2018.
Agnes Matilda Kalibata is a Rwandan agricultural scientist and policymaker, visionary leader and president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). She served as Rwanda's minister of agriculture and animal resources from 2008 to 2014 and began her tenure as president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2014. Dr. Kalibata served as the Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General.
Muhammad Ziaullah Khan Chishti is a Pakistani-American investor and business executive. He is the founder of Afiniti and TRG Global.
Ellen Beeson Zentner is a managing director and the Chief US Economist at Morgan Stanley. Zentner previously worked as a Senior Economist for the Texas State government, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd., and Nomura Securities International.
Anastasia Volkova is a Ukrainian agricultural innovator using satellite and autonomous drone technology to give an early indication of disease in crops. She studied in Ukraine, Poland and Australia. In 2020 she was living in Australia with business links to her company Flurosat in Ukraine. Her work has been recognised by the BBC and the MIT Technology Review and it had attracted substantial funding as of 2020.
Sara Hooker is a computer scientist who works in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Known for her work on model efficiency at scale, large language models and areas of research on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. Launched the Cohere For AI scholars program to increase entry points into AI research. Listed as one of AIs top 13 innovators by Fortune.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
