Speakers

Ifeoluwa (Lu) Afolayan is a co-founder of Aeropod. She is a soil aeration researcher, engineer and project lead at Muju Earth Technologies, with experience spanning product management and R&D within research and soil-related startups, and a background that bridges engineering design, agricultural systems, and real-world soil management contexts.

She is also a dual masters in Innovation Design Engineering from Imperial and the Royal College of Art. Her core strength lies in creatively translating frontier technical and scientific research into innovation that can truly be ‘integrated’. This means designing not just for technical rigour but for both economic and emotional integration into existing workflows, and continuously refining technical direction through co-design with users, researchers, and industry partners.

Rather than working from abstract assumptions, she approaches soil systems as a complex system shaped by economic pressure, human decision-making, and ecological constraints, and explicitly treats these factors as design variables.

Her leadership emphasises rapid prototyping, iterative validation in real operational contexts, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Her long-term commitment and systems-level perspective are central to translating early-stage exploration into a viable and deployable technical pathway.