Andy Jarvis (Harrogate, United Kingdom, 1977) is the Associate Director General for the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), with headquarters in Cali, Colombia. He has worked for over two decades on problems related to climate change, agriculture and food security. He has also been a founder of the Platform for Big Data in Agriculture, which strives to solve development problems faster, more efficiently and at greater scale through the use of digital innovations in farming. He has a PhD in Geography from King’s College, London. Andy is a science leader and big picture thinker with over 70 articles, book chapters or books published, including in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Climate Change and Proceedings of the Royal Society. In 2003 he won the Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) C-8 Genetic Resources award for best research paper stemming from work on conservation prioritization research for wild peanuts in Latin America, and in 2009 received the prestigious Ebbe Nielsen award for innovative research in bioinformatics and biosystematics. He has been based in Cali for the past 19 years, and when not being a scientist, Andy enjoys exploring Colombia’s natural environment, growing his own food and cooking it, and more recently becoming an amateurish YouTuber (The Irrelevant Scientist).
