Prof. Dr. Leo Marcelis

 Tentative title: Sustainable crop production in greenhouses based on crop physiological understanding

Prof. Dr. Leo Marcelis is head of the chair group Horticulture and Product Physiology at Wageningen University, The Netherlands. His research combines experimentation and simulation. It focuses on physiology, growth and product formation of plants and plant organs in order to improve sustainability and quality of crop production in controlled environments such as greenhouses or city farms. In particular fluxes of assimilates, water and nutrients in the plant, sink/source interactions and partitioning among plant organs in response to abiotic constraints are subject of study.
More info: https://www.wageningenur.nl/en/Persons/Leo-Marcelis.htm

Dr. Juan I. Montero

 Tentative title: Innovative systems for sustainable greenhouse production

Doctor Montero is research director of the Environmental Horticulture Programme at IRTA Research Institute (Barcelona, Spain). He has a PhD degree in agricultural engineering from the University of Cordoba (Spain), and a master degree from the Ohio State University (USA)
He started his career as a researcher in 1979 in Ohio, conducting tests on solar energy applications for horticulture. Since then he has been involved in a long list of Spanish and International (mostly European) research projects concerning greenhouse horticulture, environmental impact assessment in horticulture and, more recently, urban agriculture. Major research field is greenhouse technology with special focus on Mediterranean climates: physical modelling of the greenhouse climate, development of energy balance models, computational fluid dynamics studies, greenhouse covering materials, development of new greenhouse prototypes and so on. One of the articles he has co-authored received the Award of the European Society of Agricultural Engineering (EurAgEng) to the 2012-2013 best scientific article.
He has been director and co-director of ten PhD dissertations, two of them concerning urban agriculture technology and environmental sustainability. Currently he is co-directing two PhD dissertations on roof top greenhouses. He has also been a member of many scientific committees related to greenhouse horticulture. Doctor Montero has been a key-note speaker in scientific meetings held in France, Mexico, Argentina, Israel, Canada, Turkey and China as well.

Prof. Dr.Toyoki Kozai

Tentative title: Moving toward the next generation closed plant production systems: Introducing global technologies for local production

Prof. Dr. Kozai is currently the president of The Agricultural Academy of Japan. After establishing his early work on greenhouse light environments, energy savings, ventilation, computer applications, his scientific interest was extended to in vitro environments and their control for sugar-free medium micro-propagation and transplant production in closed systems with artificial lighting . Since 2010, he has been working as the president of Japan Plant Factory Association (non-profit organization) and is leading R & D of “plant factory with artificial lighting (PFAL)” and “greenhouse environment control” using heat pump, fogging, null-balance CO2 enrichment and nutrient solution control systems.
Awards: Friendship Award from Chinese Government, Lifetime Achievement Award from The Society for In Vitro Biology, USA, The Purple Ribbon Award from Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports, Japan Prize of Agricultural Sciences from Association of Japanese Agricultural Scientific Societies, and many others.
Publications: He has published more than 200 refereed papers and more than 50 book chapters. He wrote and edited more than 10 books, including “Plant Factory: an indoor vertical farming system for efficient quality food production published in October 2015 by Academic Press, and ‘LED lighting for Urban Agriculture’ to be published by Springer in October 2016.