About Cather Simpson
Cather Simpson, a chemistry and physics professor at the University of Auckland and director of The Photon Factory, has described photonics as "the creation of light — the manipulation of light, detecting light and using light as a tool to do really important things," adding that "the 21st century is going to be the century of photonics." She has stated that the role of photonics in farming and food is to increase efficiency in harvesting energy from the sun. Simpson cofounded Engender Technologies, a company that uses microfluidics and photonics to sort sperm by sex for the dairy industry. She said the company originated after a dairy expert asked if she could help with problems facing the industry, and she asked four students to generate ideas without looking at existing methods. Simpson noted that currently about 3% of dairy cows use sexed semen, and she projected that in five years it could be half or more.
Simpson also described a second spin-off company focused on analyzing the composition of milk from every cow at every milking without farmer intervention. She said the technology uses a disc-based platform similar to a CD player, with tests on the disc and an inexpensive reader at each milking station. The system can measure fat, protein, somatic cell count, and progesterone, and Simpson noted it is a platform that allows farmers to innovate by changing the disc as new tests become available. She stated that her lab has done roughly $30 million worth of work funded by government or industry to address real-world problems.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Cather Simpson's recent appearances.
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Transcript (2 segments)
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Interviewer0:10
France Silicon Valley, and I would like to request Professor Cather Simpson to tell us a bit more about your research, also how you're contributing to the tech industry in New Zealand, and how the agritech industry in New Zealand is actually revolving itself to keep giving the world the best food to eat every day.
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Cather Simpson0:28
Hi. So I'm a chemistry and physics professor, and I run a laser lab that has about 30 people in it. About half of them are engineers, and the other half are physics and chemistry students and staff. As a group, we do a lot of fundamental science, science for industry that already exists, and lately we've been spinning off our science into spin-off companies in the agritech sector. It's very exciting for us, it's quite new and quite novel. We're laser scientists. One is more advanced than the other. It does sperm sorting by sex for the dairy industry. That came to us from a dairy expert investor who said there are five problems facing the dairy industry, can you help with any? And I said sure, why not? And we chose the sperm sorting one. I went to four of my students and said give me six ideas by this time tomorrow. I don't want you to look at how they do it now. And they did that. Those four students are in the revenue sharing agreement. Three of them had no more involvement in the company, but they contributed to the very beginning idea of what led to Engender Technologies, which uses microfluidics and photonics to sort sperm. So we identify the X chromosome and the Y chromosome. Composition of milk, every cow, every milking, with no intervention from the farmer. So smart farmers would like to be able to drill down to the individual cow level and say, oh Bessie, it looks like her production is dropping, maybe she's ill. And they can't do that right now. All of their data is a herd level average. And so we designed a technology that's very much like your CD player. It uses all the tests on a disc. It's again microfluidics and photonics, because that's what we're good at. And the spinning of the disc is how we control all the movement. So all of the clever sensing tests, all the biotech, all of that stuff. The test itself is linked to the ear tag of the cow, and we can measure things like fat, protein, somatic cell count, that mastitis. We can measure progesterone. Well, we're gearing up to being able to measure progesterone. And the nice thing about it is it's a platform. So there are things we don't even know we want to know yet, and when those come up, it will be very easy for farmers to innovate because they'll just change the disk. It's like when you go from pop music to classical, you don't change your CD player, you just put in a different disc.
