As INDIVA’s Chief Technology Officer, Jose Laurentino is tasked with carrying our company and our crops forward into the future. His vast knowledge of the symbiosis between plant and machine, biological and technological, remains one of our company’s greatest assets.
Jose was born in Portugal and spent the better part of his young life living in different places around Canada and even more exotic locations including Macau. “You learn how to survive, you learn how to integrate, and you learn how to adapt very quickly,” said Laurentino about his early traveling childhood.
As a student in school, Jose’s interests were always around science, more specifically the study of botany and technology as it relates to power and energy. “I did do a couple of experiments earlier on, I inadvertently blew up a telephone pole and some other stuff when I was a kid,” he said. “That was just trying to understand what I was reading and how it applied to real-world mechanics.”
Since that time Jose honed his skills and scientific knowledge considerably. He had a series of different jobs and eventually took electronic and engineering courses at DeVry in Toronto, where he quickly excelled to the top of his class. His success cultivated into being accepted at NYU in the United States where Jose received his Master of Science (MSC) degree.
Despite his considerable education, Jose’s interest in plants and other botany was fostered at a very early age. “When I was in Europe, my grandmother, she ran vineyards. She showed me plants, how they grew, pruning, graphing, and how to pull all that together,” he said. “She also showed me how different soil types worked. She had different [types], more acidic, less acidic, she used gravity to feed in water into the irrigation troughs, and she worked with sun and shade to get different plants in different areas.”
Immediately prior to joining INDIVA, Jose worked with companies and individuals to design, develop and build greenhouse systems. More specifically, he created environmental controls for irrigation processes. He also was involved in techniques to enhance crops and flavour profiles for various kinds of produce through experimentation.
Eventually, Jose was asked to design and build a multitude of methods for growing cannabis in a vast array of locations. “I was building [systems] on rooftops, I was building under the ground, people had different places that they wanted to grow.”
Now that INDIVA is fortunate enough to have Jose on our team, his function within the company is quite clear. “My job here is to develop the growing environment and all the ancillary support services.”
Fun Fact: Jose loves anything that goes fast, including driving race cars, speedboats, going on high-velocity airplanes, and other breakneck forms of propulsion.