Derek Jacoby graduated from Rice University with a psychology degree and a lot of software development experience.  This led him to a decade at Microsoft, first as a usability engineer, then a program manager, then to Microsoft Research where he designed and developed speech recognition systems. In his post-Microsoft life, he has built wooden boats, completed a primitive living-skills apprenticeship, and finally found his way back to graduate school in computer science at the University of Victoria, where he developed an interest in synthetic biology and founded an iGEM team (iGEM is an MIT-sponsored competition to develop novel bacterial lifeforms using standardized genetic parts). His current research interests include visualizations of cancer genomics, embedded controllers and home fabrication, and automated food production.

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Future food for cities