Speakers
Professor Nicola Spence
Paul-Enguerrand Fady
Plenary
Nicola is the UK Chief Plant Health Officer at Defra and advises ministers, industry and others about the risks posed by plant pests and diseases, ensuring that measures are in place to manage those risks and minimise their impact, as well as leading the operational response in the event of a disease outbreak.
Nicola is an expert in plant health and international plant trade and previously researched virus diseases of horticultural crops in the UK and internationally for over 20 years. She is a former President of the British Society for Plant Pathology, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham, and a Trustee of The Royal Horticultural Society and The Yorkshire Arboretum. She was awarded a CBE for services to plant health in 2022.
She has a BSc in Botany from the University of Durham, an MSc in Microbiology from Birkbeck College, University of London and a PhD in Plant Virology from the University of Birmingham. The subject of her PhD was Bean Common Mosaic Virus in Phaseolus beans in Africa.
In his role as Biosecurity Policy Manager at CLTR, Paul-Enguerrand leads an extensive portfolio of workstreams in our Biosecurity Policy Unit spanning immediate, near-term, and long-term priorities in supply chain resilience for medical countermeasures, nucleic acid synthesis screening, and mirror life.
Paul-Enguerrand brings to this role several years of experience working in Parliament, covering policy areas across science, health, agriculture, environment, and innovation. His Parliamentary work has focused on advising senior policymakers on One Health, infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and the microbiome. He was previously Policy Research Lead for the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, where he led global projects on antibiotic supply chains and antimicrobial stewardship.
He undertook his doctoral research in Pharmaceutical Science as part of the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme, supervised by Prof. James Mason at King’s College London as well as Prof. Mark Sutton and Dr Lucy Bock at the United Kingdom Health Security Agency. His thesis focused on AMR.
Prior to his PhD, Paul-Enguerrand obtained B.Sc. in Microbiology and Immunology (with a minor in Linguistics) from McGill University.
Dr Deborah Hemming is the Scientific Manager of the Climate and Nature (CaN) team and the Climate and Nature Lead at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre (MOHC). She completed a PhD in Plant Science at Cambridge University in 1998 and followed this with two post-doctoral positions at the University of Ariona, USA, and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, before joining the Met Office in 2004. She has extensive research experience conducting field, laboratory, and modelling studies to understand and quantify the responses of forest ecosystems to environmental changes, with over 100 publications in this area. Her research involves the monitoring and modelling of ecosystem changes and their interactions with climate. She leads the MOHC Climate and Nature initiative, which aims to deliver integrated climate & nature science & services to inform UK Government climate and nature policies, targets & actions.