Christopher Gardner has a PhD in Nutrition Science and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford’s School of Medicine. He has been researching the health effects of a plant based diet and its components for 20 years, primarily with federal (NIH) funding. He serves on the American Heart Association’s Nutrition committee and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Culinary Institute of America. On the Stanford campus he has taken the lead in organizing Stanford Food Summit 1 in 2010, Stanford Food Summit 2 in 2011, and Stanford Food Summit 3 in 2012, which successfully connected faculty and students from across all seven of Stanford University’s undergraduate and professional schools, and connected these academics to community food activists and advocates.

Debra teaches design thinking at the d.school at Stanford with a particular emphasis in sustainability. She also works as an Advisor to business start-ups and social ventures around the world. Previously Debra worked as a business executive at Hewlett Packard. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown University and an MBA from Harvard. She serves on the Boards of the Skoll Foundation, B Lab and the Stanford Jazz Workshop and the advisory boards of IDEO.org and Yoxi.

Luke is a second-year Master of Business Administration student and co-president of the Graduate School of Business's Food, Agriculture, and Resource Management (FARM) Club. Prior to coming to Stanford, Luke was an officer in the Royal Australian Navy, where he advocated for improved nutritional standards and implemented a program to increase the amount of fresh produce available to the Navy's specialist dive teams. Luke is interested in the intersection of nutrition and wellness with entrepreneurship and healthcare.

Priya Fielding-Singh is a second year Sociology doctoral student studying the U.S. food justice and sustainability movements. Her research falls into two central projects: first, she investigates student mobilization around these issues, exploring the process through which today’s young adults are recruited to activism. Second, she studies how community-academy collaborations can engender innovative solutions for transforming our current, shockingly inequitable food system. Underpinning her personal and professional aspirations is the goal of remedying social injustices surrounding issues of food access and inequality.

Caroline is a senior majoring in Philosophy & Religious Studies with a minor in psychology. She first became interested in food and agriculture issues after spending three months working on an organic farm four years ago. Since then, she has become increasingly interested in the intersection of agricultural, social and environmental issues. One of her proudest accomplishments at Stanford is starting a program to bring Stanford freshmen to live and work on organic farms for five days before campus orientation begins.

Kyle Craft is a senior majoring in Human Biology with a concentration in Human Performance and Nutrition. He currently serves as a 
co-director for the Stanford Project on Hunger and has been serving on its leadership team for more than three years. He is passionate about food waste and local hunger issues as well as thinking critically about ways to combat the obesity epidemic.

Wolfram Alderson started as Executive Director for Sustainable Community Gardens on January 3, 2011. He brings over three decades of nonprofit experience in key leadership roles involving design, development, and administration of innovative social service, education, and environmental programs. The effort to bridge communities and their environments has been a common thread throughout his career, as has the development of innovative programs involving urban agriculture, horticulture therapy, and gardens for healing, education, and nourishment.

Erin Bridges Bird teaches biology at Lowell High School in San Francisco and works as the Summer Camp Director at Full Circle Farm. She directed social and environmental justice-based education programs before earning her M.A. and teaching credential from Stanford in 2011. Erin is passionate about developing youth empowerment through self, community, and global awareness.

Gustavo is a Stanford Junior majoring in Human Biology with an area of concentration of Community health and Healthcare policy. He grew up in Escondido, California with taking care of his parent's personal garden filled with apple, plum, guava, and peach trees. He enjoys hiking, meditating, reading and exercising on his free time. Gustavo plans to pursue a career as a physician, while engaging in social change in community clinics through community based participatory research. 

Brittany is an Urban Studies major and a Philosophy minor.  This past summer she was a field researcher and camp counselor at Full Circle Farm Summer Farm Camp.  She is passionate about using research to make our food system more environmentally and socially responsible.

Juan Reynoso is a junior majoring in Human Biology with a concentration in the Social Determinants of Health. During the summer nutrition and garden project, he most enjoyed seeing campers have their “aha moments” about food and where it comes from. Juan hopes to pursue a career in public health.

Ken Yeager was elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in June of 2006.  As a Supervisor, Ken is committed to the health and well-being of the residents of Santa Clara County and is a champion for preventive health measures such as efforts to fight the obesity epidemic.  In 2010, he authored a first-in-the-nation law requiring restaurants meet minimum nutritional standards when offering toys with kids’ meals.  This year, he created the most comprehensive healthy food and beverage policy in the California, requiring cutting-edge nutritional standards for county facilities and custodial populations. Ken earned a B.A. in political science from San Jose State University and an M.A. in sociology and a Ph.D. in education from Stanford University.

Dr. Abby C. King serves as Professor of Health Research and Policy in the Epidemiology department of the Stanford School of Medicine, and as a Professor of Medicine in the Stanford Prevention Research Center. Her work concentrates on behavioral and social ecological approaches to disease prevention in mid-life and older adults. Other interests include leveraging communication technologies to promote evidence-based intervention, addressing health disparities through community-based participatory research methods, and evaluating health promotion at the policy level. She is the Past President of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.

Janet Leader is the Director of Services at Second Harvest Food Bank where she oversees the nutrition education, CalFresh Outreach, and Food Connection hotline programs.  She is a registered dietitian with an MPH in Public Health Nutrition from UC Berkeley and has worked for over 25 years promoting  access to healthy food through policy and environmental changes.  Before working at Second Harvest, she worked on a child obesity prevention project with Dr. Tom Robinson in the Stanford Prevention Research Center, and worked for Santa Clara County Public Health Department as the regional coordinator for a nutrition and physical activity collaborative. 

Dr. Lisa Goldman Rosas is the Research Director of the Program on Prevention Outcomes and Practices within the Stanford Prevention Research Center. Her work focuses on designing and evaluating community-driven intervention strategies including innovative individual-level health education, family-based behavior change, community-wide health promotion, and health policies particularly in the areas of prenatal health, diet, and physical activity among low-income and ethnic minority populations. Other interests include using a Binational approach to understanding health of Latino immigrant populations by studying groups in sending communities (primarily Mexico) and receiving communities in the US.

Fredi Kronenberg, Ph.D. is a physiologist and international leader in women’s health and complementary and alternative medicine, with a particular focus on herbal and nutritional approaches to optimizing health. She is Consulting Professor in the Dept. of Anesthesia at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. She has helped implement groundbreaking CME courses focused on nutrition, health, and botanical medicine, and has a long-standing interest in ethnobotany and the environment. She has been a member of the Food Summit Advisory Board since its inception, and initiated the Stanford Hospital Food Project.

Dr. Preston Maring is the Medical Director of Referral Servicesat the Kaiser Permanente East Bay Medical Center in Oakland. Preston has been at the East Bay Medical Center for over 41 years where he has practiced Obstetrics and Gynecology and served in a variety of administrative roles. In 2003, he started a farmers’ market at the hospital; there are now markets at over 50 Kaiser Permanente facilities in 6 states. He has also worked with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers to source produce for inpatient meals from small family farmers.  

Dan is the director of the Department of Nutrition and Food Services at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center where he is responsible for patient meal services at two hospitals totaling 650-beds, five retail food operations with a combined sales of $6.5 million, a catering service with annual sales of $2 million, plus oversight of inpatient and outpatient nutrition services. In addition to these responsibilities, he serves as the Medical Center’s sustainability officer and is a faculty member in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology where he is conducting research on applied food safety systems.

Christie is an incoming senior at Stanford, majoring in Human Biology with a concentration in Human Nutrition and Wellness. She has been interested in nutrition and vegetarianism since middle school and hopes to become an educator to promote healthy eating and improve access to a healthy lifestyle for people across the country. She will be a Peer Health Educator on campus this year.

Farshad Fani Marvasti currently serves as Adjunct Clinical Instructor at the Stanford School of Medicine and as Associate Attending Physician at Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, CA, where he practices full spectrum Family Medicine with an emphasis on disease prevention and wellness. He is an active member of the adjunct faculty at Stanford, and advocates for the use of food as medicine through healthy cooking. Dr. Marvasti has been a member of the Food Summit Advisory Board since its inception and worked on the Stanford Food Project.