Jo Handelsman is Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a Vilas Research Professor, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology. She was previously Frederick Phineas Rose Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale and also previously served as a science advisor to President Barack Obama. Her research focuses on the role of small molecules on the structure and function of microbial communities. In the course of this work, she has discovered several new antibiotics from soil bacteria by traditional culture-based methods and metagenomics. She is founder of Tiny Earth, a consortium of college instructors and students across the world dedicated to discovering new antibiotics from soil bacteria. Her newest book, A World Without Soil, was recently published by Yale University Press.

Yan Shi is the Founder and Executive Director of Shared Harvest (Beijing) Agriculture Development, and Co-President of International CSA Network (URGENCI). She received her PhD in Agricultural Economics and Rural Development from Renmin University of China, and completed postdoctoral research at Tsinghua University’s School of Social Sciences. She is a pioneering force and active promoter behind the Chinese organic community supported agriculture (CSA) movement.

Yan Shi has also published three books—My Alternative Farming Experience in America, Revolution from the Land to the Table, and Children of the Earth - Food and Agriculture Education—and translated three books—Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming in China, Korea, and Japan, Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture, and Slow Money.