Mariano Alvarez is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Avalo, an AI-driven agricultural biotech company leveraging machine learning to develop climate-resilient crops by identifying naturally occurring genetic traits that enhance sustainability and profitability. An evolutionary plant biologist with a background from Duke University, Alvarez combines expertise in gene-environment interactions and computational biology to accelerate plant breeding, aiming to address food system vulnerabilities exacerbated by climate change. His work on optimizing crop resilience for Earth’s shifting climates also holds promise for controlled-environment agriculture in space exploration, bridging cutting-edge agtech innovation with planetary and extraterrestrial food security challenges.