OUR TEAM


Warwick Powell

Chairman – BeefLedger Global

Warwick began his career in academia, teaching Chinese history and European cultural history at Griffith University. He graduated with First Class Honours and is the recipient of the prestigious University Medal for Academic Excellence. Warwick was also awarded a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade scholarship to undertake postgraduate studies at People’s University, Beijing. He deferred his studies to begin work for Kevin Rudd in the Queensland Government.

He is the chairman and founder of Sister City Partners Limited, a not-for-profit investment bank focusing on developing links between regional Australia and the markets of Asia. Through this work, Warwick has experience in diverse industries including cattle and sheep production and processing, information and communication technology, infrastructure, energy, natural resources, travel and tourism and property development.

He is a director of a number of funds management companies responsible for funds established under an ASIC-approved Australian Financial Services License. He is a member of the Central Highlands Accelerate Agribusiness Advisory Board and was the founding Treasurer of Innovation NQ Inc., a not-for-profit innovation incubator in North Queensland.

He continues to teach professional courses in areas such as innovation, creativity, regional economic development and blockchain technology with James Cook University, QUT and Edith Cowan University.

Charles Morris

Director – BeefLedger Global

Charles has over 30 years of experience in Financial Services, Sales and Accounting. Originally from the UK, he has spent the last 15 years in Australia. He is a Director of SCP Capital Pty Ltd. Charles has an in depth supply chain knowledge which was developed in the UK and expanded upon in Australia, China, Africa, South America and the USA.

He has been involved in the BeefLedger project for the last 5 years, travelling extensively through China visiting Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Huizhou, Qingdao, Chengdu, Wuhu, Changshu and Hong Kong to fully understand the needs and expectations of both consumers and regulators. This experience has led to the development of opportunities in a range of supply chain activities globally.

Charles’ expertise straddles the finance and customer engagement side of activities, and he is fully involved with the QUT and Future Food Systems CRC Smart Trade Hubs project as an industry partner.

Juan Litovichi

Director of South American Operations

Juan is an entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the internet and tech ecosystem, has participated in several start ups and investment rounds. Launching and advising multiple technology companies in LATAM, including but not limited to consumer internet, saas, agtech solutions through blockchain, enterprise software, e-commerce, online and mobile advertising, AI and financial services.

Corporate Lawyer who specializes in venture capital, m&a, and cross-border transactions connected to Latin America, advising startups and angel investors in connection with: stock and asset purchase and sale transactions, financing rounds, loan transactions, equity instruments and convertible debt.

Carlos Hug De Belmont

Innovator & Cattle Farmer

  • Agribusiness Consultant with 30+ years experience in pastoral based production
  • Agronomic Engineer & Agribusiness Manager
  • Former Commercial Advisor Paraguayan Rural Assoc.
  • Global Beef Expert
  • Entrepreneur who is passionate about Systems Innovation
  • Engaging Systems Thinking and the process of Innovation so as to enable transformative change within a Complex system.

Professor Marcus Foth

Team Leader - trans-disciplinary research

Marcus Foth is Professor of Urban Informatics in the QUT Design Lab, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. He is also an Honorary Professor in the School of Communications and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Professor Foth’s research brings together people, place, and technology. His trans-disciplinary work is at the international forefront of human-computer interaction research and development with a focus on smart cities, community engagement, media architecture, internet studies, ubiquitous computing, and sustainability.

Professor Foth founded the Urban Informatics Research Lab in 2006 and the QUT Design Lab in 2016. Ahead of their time and before the term “smart cities” became popular, the lab pioneered a new field of study and practice: Urban informatics examines people creating, applying and using information and communication technology and data in cities and urban environments.

Professor Foth is an ACM Distinguished Speaker and has been giving invited keynote talks and presentations at leading research institutions, including Aalto University Helsinki, Aarhus University, Harvard University, IT University of Copenhagen, KAIST, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, MIT, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tsinghua University, University of Oulu, University of Oxford.

Professor Uwe Dulleck

Lead research in applied mechanism design

Uwe obtained his PhD at Humboldt University Berlin in 1999. Before Uwe joined QUT he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Linz, Austria and an Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. His publications can be found in the ‘American Economic Review’, ‘Journal of Economic Literature’, the ‘Economic Journal’, the ‘Journal of Public Economics’, the ‘International Journal of Industrial Organization’, the ‘Scandinavian Journal of Economics’, among others.

His research has been discussed in the Economic Focus of ‘The Economist’, the Sydney Morning Herald and the ‘Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung’ (the Sunday edition of Germany’s leading quality newspaper), among others.

Uwe was awarded several ARC Linkage Grants and one ARC Discovery Grant. He is a co-investigator of two Austrian Research grants. In total his research funding exceeds AUD 2,500,000).

In 2015 Uwe was the Chairman of the Program Committee for Australia’s Conference of Economists, the leading and largest conference for research and applied economists in Australia. He is an active public speaker on Behavioural Economics and its applications to Public Policy, Business Decision Making and Regulation.

Dr Felicity Deane

Team Leader - smart contract and legal compliance interfaces

Felicity is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Law and a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Queensland in 1999. Immediately following graduation Felicity commenced work and study in the United States in the disciplines of accounting and law.

She commenced PhD studies in December 2009 at Queensland University of Technology. Her PhD entitled, ‘The Clean Energy Package and WTO Law: An Analysis of Compliance Issues’ was subsequently completed in August 2013. In January 2014 Felicity commenced her time as a lecturer within the QUT law school on the early career academic program.

She has published several articles on the topic of emissions trading, market based mechanisms and the WTO Law. Her book ‘Emissions Trading and WTO Law: A Global Analysis’ was published in March 2015.

She has published extensively in areas where economics and the law intersect, in particular regarding emissions trading and other forms of market based mechanisms. Most recently she led a multidisciplinary project which analysed the Regulation of Sugarcane farming practices in Queensland, and has particularly reviewed the option of using a cap and trade model for this regulation. Felicity’s recent research interest is in the area of Blockchain technology and its use to promote sustainable agricultural practices and food security.

Dr Cao Shoufeng

Smart Contracts & Supply Chain Risk Researcher

Dr Shoufeng Cao is a post-doctoral research fellow attached to the BeefLedger Export Smart Contracts team at Queensland University of Technology. His main responsibility is to design cross-border digital beef supply chains as well as develop and execute smart contracts to improve the transparency, traceability and efficiency of cross-border beef supply chains and facilitate cross-border payments.

Dr Cao obtained his PhD degree from the University of Queensland, Australia. He has a background in industry and policy research specialising in the value adding through intelligent risk management and strategic collaboration across Agri-industry chains in production, digital supply chain, value chain and cold chain. He started his post-doc research journey from Australian Institute for Business and Economics, The University of Queensland, where he liaises with industry peak bodies, government agencies and Hort Innovation to conduct production, market as well as cross-border supply chains intelligence study and identify regional development and strategic investment actions with the aim of supporting Northern Australia’s mango, avocado and lychee industries to seize affluent Asian markets for prosperous, sustainable and healthy development.

Dr Shi Xiaoxiang

Based in Shanghai - insights into the Chinese regulatory landscape

Dr Shi is currently an assistant professor of Intellectual Property Law in East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL), and a senior lawyer at Watson & Band (Shanghai Office).

He is undertaking research on the China regulatory landscape insofar as it impacts on smart contracts design and the general deployment of blockchain technologies in the supply chain space.

He graduated from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia with a Ph.D. degree in Law (2010), and also received degrees of Master in Civil and Commercial Law (2006) and Bachelor in Law (2003) from ECUPL. From March to December 2010, Dr Shi worked for the Bureau of Coordination for Shanghai World Expo as a legal manager, handling intellectual property issues for participant countries. He was also a post-doctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Law of QUT from August 2011 to March 2012.

Dr Shi was accepted into the annual Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) run by the Oxford Internet Institute in partnership with The Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in 2007.

Jock McQueenie

Exploring new models of social investment through technology-driven engagement and value creation opportunities

John (Jock) McQueenie’s background is as an artist and arts educator. He is the founder and director of 3C Projects, a consultancy practice specialising in the design of cross sector and transdisciplinary creative partnerships. 3C projects contribute to social/digital inclusion, encourage creativity in corporate social investment and provide jobs and professional development for creative professionals throughout Australia and Aotearoa/NZ. (3Cs -Community Culture, Commerce).

His research will focus on how blockchain-enabled valorisation mechanisms can be mobilized to deliver greater remuneration transparency linking consumers and producers more directly. He will explore ways in which data value can be created and captured in novel ways, to bring new economic opportunities to regional (primary producing) communities.

This research forms a part of his Professional Doctorate studies.

Lachlan Robb

Research - legal compliance

Lachlan is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and is exploring the role of technology and innovation upon law firms. His research involves using ethnography to collect information from how law firms are practically responding to technology and what ideas like blockchain mean to legal teams on a day-to-day basis. Within the BeefLedger research team he is researching the legal compliance elements of the cattle industry and how this translates into compliant smart contract functions.

Thomas Miller (B.Eng.)

Technology Development Team

Thomas is a solutions architect specialising in blockchain / Web3 and peer-to-peer technologies. He works in Solidity, Holochain and Cargo amongst other coding languages and ecosystems. Thomas was the first in Australia to work with ConsenSys and built out the ConsenSys blockchain team in Australia. He has worked globally, and is passionate about the possibilities of peer-to-peer platforms to support more sustainable social, ecological and economic outcomes. Thomas is driving the R&D associated with BeefLedger’s Project Kratos implementation, in which multi-sig procedures anchor collective data proposal and validation processes.

Santiago Del Valle

Technology Development Team

Santiago is a native Android and web developer with strong knowledge on AWS Linux-based systems, SQL and NoSQL databases, PHP and RESTFUL web services. He is also skilled in blockchain technologies with experience in Ethereum (Solidity) development, Web3, and Holochain.

Julia Bondarenko

Technology Design Team

Julia is an experienced digital designer based in Odessa, Ukraine. She brings a design sensibility honed from experiences across a diverse range of sectors, with a strong European ‘bent’. She is working with the development team on improving our web app UI / UX. While we’ve very much been ‘function before form’ till now, Julia adds a new perspective to making our interfaces more user friendly.

Lucas Cullen

Technology Development Team

Lucas is a well-known and highly regarded member of the national and international blockchain communities. We have profiled Lucas previously here. Welcome again!

Lucas’ focus is on expanding our community-level consensus mechanisms. This is inspired by the foundational game theory work from the late Professor Thomas Schelling.

Barry Earsman

Technology Development Team

Barry comes to the project having spent recent years with global blockchain leader Consensys as a Solutions Architect. He is a full-stack developer with experience in diverse sectors. These include working in machine learning, blockchain, anti-malware, debt control, digital health, fraud detection and psychology.