Board of Directors

Aaron-Micael Beydoun

Beydoun was formerly an agriculture commodities trader with two privately-held commodity trading houses (Louis Dreyfus Commodities and Neumann Kaffee Gruppe) with posts in Shanghai, New York, Hamburg and Bogotá. He was also with a Cayman Islands-based private equity fund developing greenfield plantations in South America. He later led international business with a spin-out from the Los Alamos National Lab (Descartes Labs) where they were the first to successfully commercialize AI-powered geospatial technologies to industry and government and what is considered 1st generation of ag-tech. He is experienced working with stakeholders across the global food and energy system and is passionate about the interconnectedness of food-health-climate and commercializing breakthrough technologies — lab to market. A former mentee of renowned HBS Professor Dr. Ray Goldberg, he’s currently Corporate Development Lead with Pairwise, the leading genome-editing biotech in agriculture and food.

Compton Chase

Compton Chase is a graduate of Harvard College, 1974 and Michigan State University (PhD in Agricultural Economics, 1980) and currently Managing Member of O.O. Agriculture, LLC, a 1000 acre hazelnut orchard established in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. His previous institutional affiliations include: Foreign Service Officer and Director in The Bureau for Private Enterprise, U.S. Agency for International Development of the U.S. State Dept; Director with The NutraSweet Company of Monsanto; Executive VP for Sales Pantaleon, Guatemala (sugar refining and exporting); CEO of the International Real Property Foundation of the National Association of Realtors; Vice President for the Americas for AVEBE Agribusiness Cooperative (Dutch producer and exporter of potato starch); CEO of the Hazelnut Growers of Oregon Agribusiness Cooperative; and CEO of Crown Maple, NY (producer of maple foraged from 4000 acres of hardwood forests of the Taconic watershed of NY and Vermont).

John Power

Power has held executive positions in start-up business operations, mid-size companies and large multinationals. He is President of LSC INTERNATIONAL, Inc., a Chicago based consulting firm specializing in the provision of strategic and business development advice to participants in the global Agri-Food Chain. He has founded a number of companies and is an active Angle Investor with HBS Angels of Chicago. He serves on the boards of SWARM Engineering, Psylotech Inc., and is a Senior Advisor for IntelinAir Inc. He is a Fellow of the Farm Foundation Roundtable, and a member of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers and the American Seed Trade Association. He currently serves on the HBS Alumni Board and on the board of the Harvard Alumni Association. He holds B. Comm and M. Econ. Sc. Degrees from University College, Dublin, Ireland and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Marcus Agnew

Marcus is currently the Chief of Staff to the CEO of UPL, a multinational agri-inputs company headquartered in India. Prior to joining UPL, Marcus spent five years in McKinsey & Company's Sydney office serving a range of agri and and non-agri clients, and a year working with Arysta LifeScience in the US on strategic projects. He is passionate about the intersection of technology and agriculture, and how we can use innovation to help build a more sustainable food system that better serves the needs of consumers, farmers, and the environment. Marcus holds an MBA (Harvard Business School, Class of 2015), an MSc. in Law and Finance (Oxon), a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honors (UNSW) and a Bachelor of Economics (Sydney).

Devika Balachandran

Devika is currently a second year MPA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is passionate about transforming agriculture and related global supply chains. She also earned an MBA from the Wharton School and a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, where she studied in nitrogen cycling in agricultural systems. Devika has experience in agtech venture capital at Bayer Crop Science and AgFunder, recently served as an International Summer Fellow at the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, and worked as a management consultant in Strategy and Operations at Deloitte prior to graduate school.

Natalie Jackson

Co-President of the HBS Food, Agriculture & Water Club. Previously in healthcare investment banking at Citigroup and endowment investment management at Stanford University. Through this experience, she realized that there is a massive opportunity at the intersection of food and health, industries that typically seem disconnected. I came to HBS to connect with the broader Harvard graduate community and find ways to create a more resilient, sustainable, and nutritious global food system. She came to HBS to connect with the broader Harvard graduate community to find ways to create a more resilient, sustainable, and nutritious global food system.

Erika Veidis

Erika graduated from Harvard in 2015 with a BA in Government and Mind/Brain/Behavior, focusing primarily on community resilience, civil society, and comparative politics. Afterwards, she completed an MBA at Cal Poly, conducted environmental economics research, and worked for the Planetary Health Alliance, a Harvard-based NGO focused on the intersections of environmental challenges and public health, leading their community engagement and outreach efforts. She's currently working at a small farm in Wisconsin and helping to launch an initiative focused on local food system resilience. Erika is particularly interested in understanding how different agricultural models impact local economics, community resilience, public health, and environmental sustainability.

Motoy Kuno-Lewis

Motoy is a 2019 graduate in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College and recently-evacuated Peace Corps Volunteer. At Harvard he directed the Harvard Family Meals Program, a food rescue initiative connecting campus dining halls with food insecure individuals and families in the Boston area. He spent the past year working with farmers to help build their business in Peace Corps Malawi and is currently working as a consultant for a local startup, identifying market entry strategies for their product in agricultural commodity markets. He is particularly interested in international agricultural development, food justice, and the road towards a sustainable food system.

Cinzia Rascazzo

Rascazzo was formerly with J&J, Eli Lilly, Kraft, Goldman Sachs and later decided to become a food entrepreneur focused on improving people's health and driving sustainability through education. She is founder of Stile Mediterraneo Academy, a team of doctors and food experts providing education on a plant-based Mediterranean Diet and is also a direct-to-consumer brand of an extra virgin olive oil. It is produced in a way that does not require intensive farming and deforestation and that is naturally rich in Vitamin E and antioxidants. Razcasso is also the founder of Artisans of Taste, a social venture with the mission of fostering sustainability and tackling climate change by elevating the voices of small and sustainable farmers. Cinzia has an MBA from HBS (class of 2002), an undergraduate degree in Economics from Bocconi University and is based in Italy. Cinzia speaks Italian, English, French and basic Spanish.