Food & Agriculture Track

Taranvir is the founder and CEO at Tavolo, a platform that introduces contactless dining and pickup by allowing users to reserve a table, order menu items, and pay for meals at restaurants that they love. Restaurants can run data driven marketing campaigns through the Tavolo platform so that they can directly speak with their customers.

Laurie Kleinbaum Fink joined the Science Museum of Minnesota as a health science liaison in 2001. Since then she has held multiple positions before becoming the Chair of Science leading the Center of Research and Collections at the museum.

Before coming to the museum, Laurie worked in the pharmaceutical industry in both quality assurance and quality control roles. She attended graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota where she sequenced and characterized the gene that encodes Ets Homologous Factor (EHF).

At the Science Museum of Minnesota, Laurie has served as the Principal Investigator on several National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation funded projects. She has led the development of several SMM’s exhibits including Tissues of Life, Cell Lab, Disease Detectives, Wonder Years, Weighing the Evidence, and We Move and We Stay. She consulted on The Tech Museum of Innovations (San Jose, CA) DNA Lab and led SMM’s role in the development of Biology Base Camp at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Since 2007, Laurie has led the Science Programs Group at the museum. In this role, she worked to bring the SMM’s scientists closer to the museum’s audiences. In 2016 the Collection group joined Science Programs, forming the Center of Research and Collections under Laurie’s leadership. She has been a grant reviewer for the NIH and the Minnesota Ovarian Cancer Alliance (MOCA). In addition, she is a regular presenter at international museum conferences, involved in a national discussion around the future of Museum Collections and exploring ways to incorporate Community Science into the museum.

Laurie brings her scientific training, museum experience and passion of making science accessible and relevant to a wide audience to her work at the museum.

As Chief Financial Officer, Barry Gisser leads the Finance & Accounting, Technology & Digital, Building Operations, and Risk Management teams in advancing the Science Museum’s mission to inspire learning, inform policy, and improve lives. He joined the museum in 2017 after spending more than 25 years in leadership positions at both publicly and privately held firms including Procter & Gamble, Ecolab, and ConAgra Foods. Barry’s areas of expertise include finance and accounting, enterprise growth strategies, general management, organizational development, and change management.

Gisser is a Certified Management Accountant (CMA) with a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College and an MBA from The Kenan Flagler School at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Barry currently serves on the Board of Directors for Twin Cities In Motion and the James J. Hill Center. He also serves as a judge for MN Cup (the largest statewide start-up competition in the country) and represents the Museum as a founding member of the St. Paul Downtown Alliance.