Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.
Vishnu Jayaprakash is the CEO and co-founder of AgZen, an MIT spinout that puts cameras and AI on crop sprayers so farmers can see, for the first time, where their pesticide droplets actually land. He grew up spraying rice and mangoes by hand on his family's farm near Chennai, spent more than a decade at MIT studying how droplets cling to leaves, and turned that physics into a business that went from zero paid acres to nearly a million in two years. His pitch is blunt: agriculture has sprayed at scale for 80 years without ever measuring whether the chemical reached the plant.