John de La Parra

Dr. John de la Parra is an ethnobotanist and plant chemist with expertise in food crops and medicinal plants. He is currently the President of the Society for Economic Botany. John is also Manager of the Global Food Portfolio at The Rockefeller Foundation where his work focuses on the management of the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, a global effort to create a public database of the biochemical composition and function of the food we eat using the latest mass spectrometry technologies and bioinformatics. He also holds appointments as an Associate at Harvard University and a Lecturer at Tufts University where his expertise encompasses ethnobotany, food system innovation, agriculture, and medicinal plants. He has held additional appointments as a Research Scientist at MIT and a Lecturer of Biotechnology at Northeastern University.