Dr Simon Lovatt
As well as his leadership role, Simon contributes to growing the University's research and enterprise activity by building on his experience developing R&D and infrastructure proposals, business cases and impact cases, coaching proposal writers and building relationships with commercial partners. Major proposals in which he played significant roles include Pastoral 21, the NZ Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre, Food Innovation Waikato and the second building of the Waikato Innovation Park.
Simon joined the University in January 2017, having previously been Executive Officer, Business Operations Manager and Science Strategist in the Crown Research Institute AgResearch. Before moving into strategic roles, he led research teams in food engineering, agricultural systems and value chain modelling. Following his BE(Hons) in Chemical & Process Engineering from the University of Canterbury and PhD from Massey University, Simon started his career working with the meat processing industry and then the wider food and agritechnology industries. Through his research on food processing methods, agricultural systems and value chains, he has experience developing commercial software and hardware products, and was a co-inventor on two patented measurement technologies. He still maintains some research activity, co-supervising a PhD student at Waikato and collaborating in modelling projects with other organisations.