Marie-Angélique Laporte

Marie-Angélique is a scientist driven by her passion for data-related challenges, particularly within the agri-food ecosystem. She is deeply interested in leveraging FAIR principles and ontology-based solutions to enhance data availability in agriculture. Her primary objective is to empower the implementation of impactful machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques by cleansing and connecting data. Throughout her career, Marie-Angélique has actively contributed to the development of various ontologies, metadata schemas, and the application of knowledge graph technologies in the field of agriculture.

Presently, she is actively engaged with multiple initiatives, including the CGIAR initiatives on Digital Innovation and on Foresight, as well as the Crop Ontology, 1000FARMS, Artemis, and PTFI projects.

Marie-Angélique obtained her Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Montpellier, where her research focused on establishing data standards for the integration of functional plant trait data. It was during her Ph.D. and subsequent postdoctoral positions at the French Institute for Research in Development (IRD) and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena that Marie-Angélique developed a profound fascination for ontologies and knowledge representation. In 2015, she joined Bioversity International, where she contributed to the NSF-funded Planteome project, dedicated to developing a comprehensive set of reference ontologies for plants.