LD4D Steering Committee

The Steering Committee supports LD4D’s overarching goal by identifying and supporting improvements to livestock data. They help advance solutions in this area by providing direction on LD4D working groups and other activities, and exchange knowledge on this topic with the wider community.   

The purpose of the LD4D Steering Committee is to:

1. Advise on the scientific direction of LD4D
2. Prioritise topics for consideration and implementation
3. Advise on LD4D’s knowledge exchange and communication strategy
4. Identify and promote opportunities to move towards a sustainable structure 
5. Review the progress of LD4D’s working groups and other activities 
    

Steering Committee members

Image	Andrew Bisson (LD4D Steering Committee chair) is a Senior Livestock Advisor for the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He started his career in smallholder farm veterinary practice before completing an MSc in Tropical Veterinary Medicine and Epidemiology at Edinburgh University. He has lived and worked in a number of countries in East and West Africa, Asia and the Middle East, working with pastoral and mixed crop-livestock production systems. His interests include strengthening animal health service delivery including community-based animal health; transboundary and zoonotic disease control and One-Health initiatives; livestock market system development, and resilience programming.
Image	Isabelle Baltenweck is a Program Leader for Policies, Institutions and Livelihoods at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). She is a development economist with twenty years’ experience in agricultural systems in Africa, South and South-East Asia, focusing on livestock value chains. Isabelle has increasingly sharpened her skills in gender and social equality research, looking at how women and men’s needs and capabilities differ on terms of accessing and using technologies and practices.  She has worked at the interface of research and development, working with private sector, farmers’ groups, ministries, NGOs and investors
Image	Dahlanuddin is a professor of ruminant nutrition at the Faculty of Animal Science University of Mataram, Indonesia. He is also an Adjunct Professor at The School of Environment and Rural Science University of New England, Australia and at School of Agriculture and Environment, Massey University, New Zealand. He has been a key researcher in a series of international collaborative research and development on smallholder beef cattle in Indonesia since 2001, and in Timor Leste since 2011. Dr. Dahlanuddin has good links with government, private sectors and international organisations, and has been actively involved in M&E of development projects.
Image	Leah Arabella Germer is an Agriculture Specialist in the Agriculture and Food Global Practice of the World Bank. She specialises in the area of livestock and climate change and focuses on countries in Latin America and Africa. Previously Leah worked as a fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Washington, DC and as a research consultant at the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica. She has a master’s degree in Environmental Policy from American University and is currently a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research with the Animal Production Systems Group.
Image	Bernard Nyakundi Kimoro is currently the Head, Climate Change and Livestock Sustainability Section in the State Department for Livestock Development (SDLD), Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development (MOALD) in Kenya. In this role, he coordinates Livestock Climate Change policies and measures that facilitate enhanced adaptive capacity and sustainable livestock systems which support resilience amongst farmers and pastoralists in Kenya. As a member of the Ministerial Climate Change Unit (CCU) he is also in the Kenya delegation that negotiates on agriculture (crops and livestock) issues under the UNFCCC agriculture negotiation platform. As a development agent, he has more than 20 years of skills and knowledge in the areas of livestock production and rural development; livestock project management; Livestock GHG modelling, inventory and MRV development; and Livestock Value Chain Development and Actor Empowerment.
Image	Ulf Magnusson is professor of Animal Reproduction at the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). He is a licensed Swedish Veterinarian and Diplomate of the European College of Animal Reproduction. His current research activities deal with infectious diseases in livestock that affect reproduction and might be transmissible to humans.
Image	Shannon Mesenhowski is a Senior Program Officer with the Livestock Team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Shannon is responsible for the Foundation's animal systems body of work, focusing on policy, data, veterinary service, advocacy, and collaboration as tools for optimising livestock’s role in development. Shannon has a Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M.) and Master of Public Health (M.P.H.) degrees from the University of Minnesota, and has worked in private clinical veterinary practice doing both mixed and small animal work.
Image	Simplice Nouala Fonkou is Head of Division of Agriculture and Food Security at the Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture, African Union Commission. His background is in tropical animal health and production.
Image	Julie Ojango is a senior scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). She works on projects designed to identify appropriate breeds and breed combinations for ruminant livestock production systems found in middle and low-income countries.  She has been instrumental in developing national livestock performance monitoring databases in developing countries. Her current research focus is on dairy improvement in smallholder farming systems, and on improving sheep and goat productivity in extensive pastoral systems and climatically challenged smallholder systems.
Image	Christie Peacock is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Sidai Africa Ltd an innovative social business in Kenya offering quality livestock and crop products and services to over 400,000 farmers through a network of retail outlets. Sidai is a Kenyan company with start-up financing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The company has attracted increasingly commercial investment to support its growth in recent years.
Image	Ugo Pica-Ciamarra is an agricultural economist with over 20 years of experience in evidence-based policy and planning in the livestock sector in developing countries. He is the Policy Lead of the Global Health Security Program in the Animal Production and Health Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. His areas of expertise are livestock statistics, livestock data collection systems, and livestock sector policies and institutions. He holds a PhD in Development Economics, an MA in in Agricultural Economics, and a MS in Economics and Finance.
Image	Dominic Smith is Associate Professor at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Australia.  He is an agricultural economist with more than 3 decades of experience in livestock economics and rural development across academia, INGOs, multilateral organizations and the private sector. Early career highlights included contributing to livestock policy development in Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia and a PhD on modelling Chinese live cattle and beef marketing systems.  More recently, he has worked on modelling of cattle and beef movements in Asia and developing a methodology for socio-economic and livelihood impact assessment of animal diseases. He currently leads the economic, social and policy assessment components of the Global Burden of Animal Diseases (GBADs) case study in Indonesia.
	Paolo Tizzani currently works at the World Animal Health Information and Analysis Department, World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH). Paolo does research in Veterinary Medicine with a special focus on diseases in Wildlife. His most recent publication is 'Sarcoptic mange in wild ruminants in Spain: solving the epidemiological enigma using microsatellite markers'. Paolo belongs to the European College of Zoological Medicine - Wildlife Population Health Diplomate.