Addressing Global Changes

Lino Dias, PhD, Vice-President Smallholder Farming at Bayer AG, is the Vice-President Smallholder Farming at the Crop Science Division of Bayer AG. The focus of his work is to develop and scale business solutions that help smallholder farmers worldwide to reach their farming potential and grow their farms into sustainable businesses, while creating a meaningful livelihood impact on them and on their rural communities. Together with several partners, he launched the Better Life Farming (BLF) alliance, which has been implemented in several countries already and got a special recognition by the UNECE for its stakeholder engagement. Recently he co-authored papers at the Harvard Business Review about BLF and other smallholder farming models.
With a graduation and a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Lisbon, in Portugal, and an internship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the USA, he did several management and leadership trainings in leading business schools in the UK, Spain and Switzerland during his career at Bayer.
He started working at Bayer in 2001 doing Research & Development and since then he led several business projects in all regions of the world and in very diverse areas, such as supply chain, communication & change management, IT, product management and strategic marketing and was management support to the CEO in his previous position. Since 2021 he is Invited Professor at the University of Lisbon. He won several international awards and a City Medal from his hometown, Portalegre, in Portugal.

Chemical engineering has proven to be one of the most flexible and versatile academic educations one can get, preparing professionals to take over very diverse jobs in industry along their careers. Global challenges, such as climate change, water availability, food security or biodiversity, are forcing humanity to look out for new answers and solutions. Chemical engineers are at a central point of many of these solutions, but their jobs, centered traditionally around processes and products, necessarily must see the broader picture of sustainability in all its dimensions: economic, environmental and social.