Andrew Held has ten years of operations and R&D experience at Cargill, Inc., an international provider of food, agricultural and risk management products and services, where he held instrumental roles on technical, engineering, and operations management teams scaling production processes for commercialization. His work has included the manufacture of organic acids and edible polyols by fermentation, lactic acid for polymers, and natural polyols for polyurethanes. Andrew specializes in the integration of biological and chemical processes and has worked extensively with natural feedstocks and biocatalytic conversion methods. He earned his BS, Chemical Engineering, from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and MS, Chemical Engineering, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.