Pam Marrone Founder, Marrone Bio Innovations Treasurer, National AWIS Board of Directors
Dr. Marrone started Marrone Bio Innovations in 2006 to discover, develop and market bio-based products for pest management and plant health. In 2013, MBI listed on NASDAQ. MBI has five commercial products and several more in the pipeline. In October 2014, Dr. Marrone was awarded Agrow’s “Best Manager with Strategic Vision” for her career-long leadership in biopesticides. The company received the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award and a California Department of Pesticide Regulation IPM Innovator award. Dr. Marrone founded AgraQuest in 1995 and served as its CEO, Chairman and President until March 2006. AgraQuest commercialized several biopesticide products that became the biological standards for their categories. Before AgraQuest, she was founding president and business unit head for Entotech, Inc. in Davis (CA), a biopesticide subsidiary of Denmark-based Novo Nordisk. At Monsanto, she led the Insect Biology group. She is Treasurer of the Association for Women in Science, and a past Board member and treasurer for the Organic Farming Research Foundation. She is Founding Chair of the Biopesticide Industry Alliance and just recently elected to be on the Board of Trustees at Cornell University. She has a B.S. in entomology with Honors and Distinction from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in entomology from North Carolina State University.
Robert Powell Professor of Chemical Engineering and Food Science and Technology, UC Davis Councillor, National AWIS Board of Directors
Professor Powell is a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and of Food Science and Technology at the University of California, Davis. He has been Vice Chair (2011-12) and Chair (2012-13) of the Academic Senate of the University of California System and the Chair of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate (2008-11). From 2002 until 2011 he was the Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Currently he is the Chair of the Science and Technology Committee of the Board of Governors that oversees Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has published over 110 papers in peer-reviewed journals. He teaches lower division, upper division and graduate courses in many areas of chemical engineering. He is a member of the Society of Rheology, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Chemical Society and the American Physical Society. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.