Professor Jessica Fanzo Appointed Team Lead on Food Security and Nutrition
Jessica Fanzo, the Bloomberg Distinguished Associate Professor of Ethics and Global Food and Agriculture and Director of the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and SAIS, has been appointed team lead for food systems and nutrition for the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition. The panel was established in 2010 as the science-policy interface of the U.N. Committee on World Food Security (CFS).
At its 42nd session in October 2015, CFS commissioned the panel to prepare a report on nutrition and food systems, expected to be presented at CFS 44 in October 2017. Based on a call for experts, Fanzo was chosen to lead the team out of 139 candidate applications. She will lead her colleagues in analyzing the current state of food security and nutrition, providing scientific and knowledge-based advice on specific policy-relevant issues using existing research and identifying emerging issues to help members prioritize future actions.
Before her time at Johns Hopkins, Fanzo served as an assistant professor of nutrition in the Institute of Human Nutrition and Department of Pediatrics at Columbia University from 2013 to 2015. She also acted as the senior advisor for nutrition policy at the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development. Fanzo was previously at the REACH Interagency partnership at the United Nations World Food Program and Bioversity International of the Centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in Rome, Italy. From 2007 to 2010, she served as the advisor for East and Southern Africa at the Millennium Development Goal Center at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya. Fanzo was also the first laureate in 2012 of the Daniel Carasso Premio prize for her work on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. She has a PhD in Nutrition from the University of Arizona and completed a Stephen I. Morse postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology at Columbia University.