Meet the moderators
Heather Mackay
Heather Mackay is a geographer based at the Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden, working at the intersection of agriculture, food, and urban life in the Global South. She completed a bachelors in Geography from Aberdeen University, Scotland, a Masters in Rural Resources and Environmental Management from Imperial College London; and a Masters in Spatial Planning and Development from Umeå University, Sweden.
She worked 10 years in international development in the UK, USA and Ghana before returning to academia. Her doctoral research investigated transitions at the nexus of urbanisation, food environments, and health in Uganda. Heather works across a mix of methods including spatial, qualitative, and quantitative.
Matthew Kessler
Matthew Kessler is a food systems podcaster, science communicator and project coordinator at SLU. Matthew has worked with farmers in North Carolina, New York, Hawai'i, Nepal, and Norway, with a BSc in Environmental Sciences and MSc in Agroecology.
Over the past 15 years, he has worked on farms and in kitchens, labs and classrooms - and most recently in recording studios - to better understand and communicate what is a 'good’, just and resilient future for food.