Meet the team
LiteFarm was born out of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia and is now being developed by a global team of staff, students, and contributors.
Carolina di Lello
UX/UI Designer
Carolina is a passionate designer. She started as a Graphic Designer with a strong interest in web design. Her interest for making digital products taylored to users lead her to study UX Design. She joined LiteFarm as a UX/UI Desiger in 2022. In her free time she likes spending time cooking with her friends and family. She also likes to travel, meeting new people and visiting new places and cultures
Dana James
Advisor
Dana has been involved with LiteFarm since 2017, when she supported focus groups with diversified farmers in Canada to understand their visions for a farm management platform that would meet their needs. For the past few years, she has been working on a participatory action research project with agroecological farmers across Latin America who are interested in using LiteFarm to measure agroecological indicators and streamline their agroecological certification processes.
David Trapp
Farmer Success Manager
David (he/him) has been involved with agriculture for most of his life, from working on farms and teaching gardening classes, to working as an Agricultural Technician with Peace Corps Paraguay, and now as the Farmer Success Manager. His interests in growing food sustainably have taken him around the world, and served as a bridge to connect with diverse groups of people and projects. He has an Interdisciplinary degree in Energy, Agriculture and Climate Change from Western Washington University. Apart from LiteFarm, he is the co-founder for Nuevos Brotes, a reintegration program that provides agricultural job training and support to incarcerated persons in Paraguay. He is currently based in Brazil, where he is pursuing a Masters in Organic Agriculture from the Federal University of Rural Rio do Janeiro and enjoys scuba diving, hiking, and dancing.
Duncan Brain
Community Manager & Jr. Full Stack Engineer
Duncan Brain is a Software Engineer at LiteFarm. He is passionate about open source software and is having fun starting out his career at LiteFarm. Duncan has two undergraduate degrees: one in Physics and one in Marketing. In his spare time he is in the process of creating a small-scale regenerative farm. Duncan has worked in a variety of industries including Education, Nuclear, Aerospace and Retail. He is also looking for remote work in Software Engineering so please feel free to check out his LinkedIn
Kat Roger
Research Associate
Kat (she/they) is a researcher in the Food Sovereignty Research Group at UBC. She works in agroecology, food sovereignty, arts-based activism, and indigenous sovereignty and decolonization movements. As a member of the LiteFarm team, Kat collaborates with Latin American farmers and extension officers in Participatory Guarantee System organizations to pilot LiteFarm as a tool for agroecological certification.
Kevin Cussen
Product Lead
Kevin (he / him) has held an odd collection of roles throughout his career, from Peace Corps volunteer, to software engineer, to founder and CEO of a West African biogas-as-a-service company. For the last eight years, he's worked in various product management roles at a mix of private, public, and nonprofit entities, including leading roles on two open source projects - OpenLMIS and LiteFarm. Kevin has an MBA from the University of Washington and a Bachelors in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas. In his spare time, Kevin likes spending time with his family, reading about history and economic theory, and long distance backpacking trips.
Hannah Wittman
Professor, IRES Professor, Land and Food Systems
Dr. Hannah Wittman’s research examines the ways that the rights to produce and consume food are contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agrarian citizenship. Her projects include community-based research on farmland access, transition to organic agriculture, and seed sovereignty in British Columbia, agroecological transition and the role of institutional procurement in the transition to food sovereignty in Ecuador and Brazil, and the role that urban agriculture and farm-to-school nutrition initiatives play in food literacy education.
Larisse Cavalcante
Larisse Cavalcante is a visiting master's research student at UBC investigating crop diversification in southern Brazil via LiteFarm. She is an environmental engineer highly interested in sustainable food systems, especially agroforestry. Larisse is also a certified social project manager with experience in the non-profit sector. She worked with volunteer management at Engineers Without Boarders USA (EWB-USA) and with fundraising at EWB Brazil. Her interests also include scientific communication and interdisciplinary studies. In her spare time, she likes to be outdoors, to socialize, to cook and to learn about different topics.
Advisor
Khanh Dao Duc
Advisor
Khanh Dao Duc is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Prior to UBC, he was born and grew up in Paris, where he did his PhD before working at UC Berkeley and UPenn as a Postdoctoral scholar. While his research primarily focuses on developing quantitative methods to analyze complex datasets in Neuroscience, structural and molecular cell biology, he joined the interdisciplinary Peter Wall Scholars program in 2021 and started to collaborate with Hannah Wittman to analyze the data generated from Litefarm. Since summer 2021, his team of students at UBC has been developing computational and statistical tools to generate technical reports, and help social scientists and researchers study the determinants of agrodiversity using the data collected in Litefarm.
Mwayanjana Bolokonya
Quality Assurance Engineer
Mwaya has a keen interest in the intersection of software and entrepreneurship. In 2012 he founded a sustainable red brick company in his native Malawi. With the rise of the crypto industry in 2017 his passion for software was revitalised and he went on to complete his Bachelor of Commerce degree in Information Systems and Business Management at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, following this he began to actively seek opportunities in the Tech industry. In his free time Mwaya works on his side project and enjoys a game of pickup basketball.
Noa Bridson
Research Associate
Noa loves to spend her time outdoors, running, growing food, and collecting new plant specimens. She recently graduated from the faculty of Land and Food Systems where she focused her studies on agroecological management and plant health. In her summers between university Noa has worked on three different farms and loves to be able to provide healthy organic produce to others. Noa is passionate about the role that small-scale farming plays in building community and is excited by the work she does as part of the LiteFarm team.
Sarah-Louise Ruder
Advisor
Sarah-Louise is a PhD candidate and Public Scholar at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability. Her social science research investigates challenges and opportunities for sustainability, justice, and data governance with the increasing digitalization of the food system. As a member of the LiteFarm team, she collaborates on data management, governance, and justice initiatives. In addition, she acts as a liaison with international networks, including the FAO’s Improving Global Agriculture Data community of practice.
Sayaka Ono
Full stack Engineer
Sayaka is a software developer who found her interest in programming while she was working as a magazine writer and got into web development due to her love for computers and software. She has a passion for making great user experiences and brings her experience, including working in an AgTech company and other industries to LiteFarm. Outside work, you can find her walking a seawall or a trail or exploring new restaurants and cafes.
Yan Zhang
Research Associate
Yan Zhang is the Data Visualization and Innovation Assistant for the LiteFarm project. She wrote SQL queries to clean and aggregate data from SurveyStack, PostgresSQL, and spreadsheets. She also built dashboards in Tableau to visualize LiteFarm Adoption Status. Yan has a BS in Statistics from the University of British Columbia. In her spare time, Yan likes doing yoga, dancing, and cooking.
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Yuka Matsuno
Research Associate
With a deep appreciation for farmers and all they do for us, Yuka is proud to work on the LiteFarm app to create a tool that can help farmers around the world. They enjoy cooking, dancing, and of course eating in their free time, and have a deep appreciation for a perfectly ripe apricot. Yuka has experience working on multiple mixed vegetable farms and knows how labor intensive food production is. She also has experience working with the national school lunch program in the U.S., and is equally as passionate about connecting students, and the public, to their food systems.
