Innovations in Crop Protection towards Sustainable Agriculture

Allan Watson completed MSci Pure and Applied Chemistry at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow from 1999 to 2004. He then received a PhD from the University of Strathclyde from 2004 to 2008. After Lindemann Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University from 2008 to 2010 with Prof. Sir D. W. C. MacMillan he completed Industrial postdoc at GlaxoSmithKline, Stevenage from 2010 to 2011. From October 2011 to November 2015 he was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde to becoming a senior Lecturer in November 2015 to December 2017. From January 2018 to July 2021 he was a reader in Homogeneous Catalysis at the University of St. Andrews where he is now a professor of Organic Chemistry.

Fides Benfatti studied Chemistry at the University of Bologna in Italy, where she obtained her Master degree in 2004. The same year, she started in Bologna her PhD in the field of Medicinal Chemistry. After obtaining her PhD in 2008, Fides started her post-doctoral studies in the field of asymmetric catalysis, under the supervision of Professor P.G. Cozzi.
In 2012, after a second post doc at EPFL Lausanne in the group of Professor J. Waser, she joined Syngenta Crop Protection in Switzerland as Team Leader in Research Chemistry.
At Syngenta, Fides covered several roles, including Head of Insect control Lead Generation for 6 years and Head of Computational Chemical Design and Modelling. Since 2022 she is leading the Research Chemistry section which focuses on Insect and Disease control.

Giulio Volpin has a background in pharmaceutical chemistry and technology and has conducted graduate studies in the area natural products total synthesis. He is currently a Lab Leader in Process Research at Bayer AG, Crop Science Division, where his work focuses on route scouting and scale-up for novel crop protection active ingredients, as well as the advancement of digital chemistry and data science for chemical applications.

James Bull is a University Research Fellow and Reader in Synthetic Chemistry at Imperial College London. He obtained his undergraduate MSci degree from the University of Cambridge, then spent a year at GlaxoSmithKline. He returned to University of Cambridge to obtain his PhD under the supervision of Professor Steven Ley. In 2007 he joined the group of Professor André Charette as a postdoctoral fellow at Université de Montréal. He joined Imperial College London in 2009 as a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellow, and in 2011 was awarded an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship. In January 2016, he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. He recently received the AstraZeneca prize for synthetic chemistry (2021). His research targets methods for the synthesis of biologically relevant chemical motifs.

Thomas Stevenson received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1983, under the supervision of Nelson J. Leonard. After postdoctoral research at the University of Geneva in Switzerland from 1983 to 1985 with Wolfgang Oppolzer, Stevenson joined DuPont Crop Protection in 1985 as a research chemist, rising in ranks to DuPont Fellow. Upon his retirement in 2017, he joined FMC Agricultural Solutions as an FMC Fellow.
During his career he has proven to be a prolific inventor in the field of agricultural chemistry across insecticides, fungicides and herbicides. He holds over 80 issued United States patents and has presented over 120 lectures and posters at scientific meetings.