Director of Agricultural Modeling and Lifecycle Assessment

Greg Thoma, Ph.D. is the Director of Agricultural Modeling and Lifecycle Assessment for the AgNext program at Colorado State University. He is leading efforts at stakeholder engaged, experimentally verified, model development for sustainable animal agriculture systems. Dr. Thoma served on the steering committee from 2014-2019 on the Swiss National Science Foundation’s National Research Program titled, “Healthy Nutrition and Sustainable Food Production” that has the goal of promoting healthy nutrition through a safe, high quality food supply, available in sufficient quantity at affordable prices, while minimizing environmental impacts and fostering efficient resource utilization.

He recently retired after a 28-year career in Chemical Engineering at the University of Arkansas where he served as inaugural Director for Research of The Sustainability Consortium and Director for Research for the University of Arkansas Resiliency Center. He has worked in sustainable food systems since 2008 and has led numerous food and agriculture life cycle assessment projects: milk, cheese, milk delivery systems, yogurt, swine, poultry, corn, fruits and vegetables, pulses, and beef.

He is the North American subject editor for Agriculture for the International Journal of Lifecycle Assessment and has served on the scientific/technical/organizational committee for numerous international LCA conferences. He has been active with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership since its inception serving as the Technical Advisory Group Lead/Co-lead for development of the poultry, swine, and large ruminants’ guidelines.