Laurence Smith, Lect. Ph.D.

Dr. Laurence Smith is Lecturer in Agricultural Business Management at the University of Reading and visiting Researcher at SLU (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences).

He has secured £10.7 million in research funding for various research initiatives, with over £7.9 million of that amount as Principal Investigator (PI). He serves as the PI for PATHWAYS, a significant Horizon 2020 project with a budget of 9 million EUR. This project engages a consortium of over 30 partners focused on formulating policy pathways to advance sustainable livestock systems. He has effectively led numerous projects, work-packages, and tasks assessing trade-offs within livestock systems across environmental, economic, social, and governance domains and has fostered robust connections within the agri-food and policy sectors to uncover drivers and barriers that influence behavioural shifts within food systems. He played a central role in coordinating the development of the Defra funded Public Goods tool (PG tool), which has been successfully utilised on more than 1000 farms across diverse projects, effectively evaluating multifaceted dimensions of sustainability. Laurence established and led the Environment, Sustainability, and Health (ESH) research group at the Organic Research Centre and currently leads the Sustainability Assessment of Food Systems (SAFS) research group at the University of Reading.