Keynote Address
David Beasley, University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law
David Beasley, a former governor of South Carolina, recently served as the executive director of the World Food Programme, having been nominated by two presidential administrations of two different parties and appointed to that role initially in 2017 by the UN Secretary-General of the United Nations and served until April 2023. Under Beasley’s leadership, the World Food Programme was the largest humanitarian organization in the world, assisting over 160 million people in 2022 alone and raising over $55 billion. In 2020, he received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the World Food Programme for its efforts to provide food assistance in conflict areas and to prevent food from being used as a weapon of war and conflict. Beasley has also received the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award.
Rory Stewart, Professor of the Practice, Yale Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy
Rory Stewart was most recently the president of GiveDirectly. He was previously the UK Secretary of State for International Development, a member of the National Security Council, Minister of State for Africa, Middle East, and Asia, Minister of State for Prisons and Probations, Minister for the Environment and chair of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. He founded and ran the Turquoise Mountain foundation in Afghanistan and was the director of the Carr Centre and the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the co-presenter of the UK’s leading podcast, “The Rest is Politics.” He was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his work in Iraq and holds two honorary doctorates.
Fireside Chat
Ertharin Cousin, Director & CEO, Food Systems for the Future
Ertharin Cousin currently serves as the managing director and CEO of FSF Ventures, an
impact investment fund, and as the CEO of Food Systems for the Future Institute, the Fund’s sister nonprofit. She also serves as a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; a Robert Weizsäcker Fellow at Bosch Academy; and as a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Center on Food Security and Environment. From 2012-2017, Cousin was the executive director of the World Food Programme, leading the work of identifying, championing, and implementing more sustainable solutions for global hunger and malnutrition. From 2009-2012, Cousin served as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. She was also the executive vice president and COO of America’s Second Harvest, now known as Feeding America.
Shannon Maynard, Executive Director, Congressional Hunger Center
Shannon Maynard assumed the position of executive director of the Congressional Hunger Center in September 2015. Prior to working at the Hunger Center, she served as chief talent and knowledge officer at Grameen Foundation and held various leadership positions managing AmeriCorps programs for local and national nonprofits focused on hunger and youth empowerment. She also serves as adjunct faculty at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Maynard received an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in journalism and political science from the University of Richmond.
Molly Phee, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
Molly Phee is a senior U.S. diplomat known for her strategic leadership in navigating complex political and security challenges. She has led negotiations to end conflicts, build coalitions, and arrange humanitarian access across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. She has operated effectively in insecure environments, collaborating with the U.S. military, USAID and other U.S. government agencies, the UN, international NGOs, foreign partners, and civilian stakeholders. Her work has been recognized with the Distinguished Honor Award, the Presidential Rank Award, the Order of the British Empire, and other prestigious commendations for leadership in diplomacy and peacebuilding. Phee earned a BA from Indiana University and a MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Panelists and Moderators
Kristin L. Ahlberg, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State (retired)
Kristin L. Ahlberg served as the assistant general editor, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, until her retirement in July 2024. She is the author of “Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace;” her second book, entitled “Cultivating Compassion: Human Rights, World Hunger, and the Carter Administration,” is under contract with the University Press of Kansas. During her 21 years in the Office of the Historian, Ahlberg compiled or co-compiled 10 volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series and edited or reviewed another 70 volumes.
Yuval Ben-David, Chief Strategy Officer, Yale International Leadership Center
Yuval Ben-David is the chief strategy officer for the International Leadership Center, responsible for strategy and communications and managing the climate and peace portfolios. A graduate of Yale and Oxford, Yuval has worked on climate security and peacebuilding with UNEP, OCHA, the World Bank and EcoPeace Middle East.
Helia Bidad, Environmental Lawyer
Helia Bidad is a graduate of Yale Law School and an environmental lawyer currently working as an appellate lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. She previously clerked for the Honorable Kimberly J. Mueller in the Eastern District of California and served as a Yale Liman Fellow at the Land Loss Prevention Project in Durham, North Carolina. At LLPP, she used law, policy, and organizing strategies to help minority and low-resourced farmers and landowners retain their land. Her research and publications have covered farmworker rights, environmental justice and race, and environmental justice in tribal courts.
Mark Bomford, Director, Yale Sustainable Food Program
Mark Bomford is the director of the Yale Sustainable Food Program and was the founding director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His current research, in cooperation with the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and Environment, explores controlled environment agriculture (CEA), more-than-human ecologies, and enclosure in practice and theory. Mark belongs to a settler family, raised on and off-grid in northern British Columbia on Treaty 8 territory. He farmed for a decade on the unceded ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people and currently lives, works, and vicariously farms on traditional Quinnipiac lands. He’s been interested in climate change and sustainable agriculture since the mid-1990s, exploring and attempting to work with its challenges and contradictions through physics, philosophy, art, agroecology, commercial farming, community activism, science and technology studies, and human geography.
Samara Brock, Postdoctoral Researcher, UCSC
Samara Brock has worked for over 20 years in sustainable food systems as a planner for the City of Vancouver, implementing NGO projects in Cuba and Argentina, and as a program officer at the Tides Foundation in Vancouver funding organizations working on complex conservation, climate change, and food security initiatives. She completed her PhD from the Yale School of the Environment in 2024, which focused on organizations working to transform the future of the global food system. Her current USDA-funded postdoctoral research at UCSC focuses on the experience of farmers working to sequester carbon in agricultural soils, scientists working to create robust systems of measurement, and global experts who are working to set up — and some to oppose — carbon markets.
Nicole Civita, Director, EcoGather & Sterling College
Nicole Civita, JD, LL.M. is a food systems thinker, educator, attorney and consultant whose work is grounded in ecological knowledge, attentive to relationships of care and reciprocity, and aimed at collective liberation. After a decade as a professor of food systems, law and ethics, and several years as the vice president of Sterling College, Nicole now runs EcoGather, a collapse-responsive, cosmo-local, collaborative community learning network. Nicole is the co-author of “Feeding Each Other: Shaping Change in Food Systems Through Relationship.”
Mengistu Assefa Dadi, Peace Fellow, Yale International Leadership Center
Mengistu Assefa Dadi is a political and conflict analyst from Ethiopia, with expertise in conflict, peacebuilding, policy research, and designing peace dialogue projects in fragile societies. Prior to coming to Yale as a 2025 Peace Fellow at the Jackson School of Global Affairs, he served as head of programs and programs manager at the Center for Advancement of Rights and Democracy, leading human rights, media freedom, and democratic governance initiatives in Ethiopia. He has also been a consultant and political analyst for the Henry Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, contributing to conflict resolution efforts. Since 2021, he has worked as a consultant for the International Crisis Group on Ethiopia.
Emma Dodd, Research Associate, CSIS Global Food and Water Security Program
Emma Dodd is a research associate with the Global Food and Water Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she supports the program’s analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war’s impacts on agricultural markets, global food security, and Ukraine’s agriculture sector. Ms. Dodd holds a BA in international relations with minors in political economy; environmental and sustainability studies; and science, technology, environment, and public policy from Michigan State University. She is currently pursuing her Master of Science degree in geospatial intelligence at the University of Maryland.
Brian Drohan, Associate Professor of History, U.S. Military Academy-West Point
Brian Drohan is an associate professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy-West Point and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He led an armored platoon in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division, worked at the U.S. Embassy to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and served as a strategist at Eighth Army headquarters in South Korea. He is the author of “Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire” and earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina.
Michael Franczak, Senior Researcher, United Nations University Centre for Policy Research
Michael Franczak is a senior researcher at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research and an expert on climate and development finance. He is a visiting fellow at Perry World House, University of Pennsylvania, and adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University. Previously, he was a research fellow at the International Peace Institute, supporting small-island states in UN climate talks. He has also worked for the UNFCCC and advised the Maldives on loss and damage finance. Trained as a historian, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Penn and Yale and is the author of “Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s.”
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace, Provost Associate Professor, American University School of International Service
Born and raised in a Kentucky farming community, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace researches and teaches agricultural policy and agrarian geography at American University SIS’ Environment, Development & Health Department. She has a forthcoming book, “The Power of Seeds & Agricultural Biodiversity Governance,” on data, bioethics, climate, and coloniality in crop diversity conservation. She also has published widely on the surprising history, political ecology, and domestic and international impacts of the U.S. Farm Bill and geopolitics of food aid. She is co-founding lead on the Agroecology Research-Action Collective, the Disparity to Parity program, AU’s Ethnography of Empire research cluster, the Pointing the Farm Bill Toward Racial Justice project, and Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance’s Policy Team. She has a PhD in geography from University of Kentucky, a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA from Yale.
Deborah Grieg, Farm Director, Common Ground & New Haven Ecology Project
Deborah Greig is the farm director at Common Ground, an environmental charter high school in New Haven. After attending Vassar College, Deborah spent the 15 years prior to Common Ground seeking out educational farming and food justice organizing opportunities in places like New York’s Hudson Valley, at Hawthorn Valley Farm, and Santa Cruz, California, at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. She has also worked with New York City farming nonprofits, like East New York Farms.
Zach Helder, Senior Manager, Petersen & Company
Zach Helder is senior manager at Petersen & Company, a public affairs and management consulting firm serving the agricultural sector. An agriculture policy expert, he has advised government and private-sector clients and served as an advisor in the U.S. Congress. As a food security advocate, his writing explores agricultural trade as a tool of international politics and war. Recently, he led a working group of former USDA secretaries and U.N. officials on global food insecurity amid the Russia-Ukraine War, publishing recommendations in Foreign Affairs. A Kansas City native, Helder holds an MPA from Princeton University and a BA from UCLA.
Allison Holland, MPP candidate, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
Allison Holland is a second-year MPP student at the Jackson School of Global Affairs focusing on global food security, clean energy, and gender. She recently interned for USAID’s Resilience, Environment, and Food Security Bureau on their One Health Project. She spent last summer in South Africa, interning for ACDI/VOCA on a farmer development and gender inclusion project. Before Yale, Allison worked on federal marketplace policy at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, West Africa, where she initiated a food security program in her village.
Michelle Jurkovich, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Michelle Jurkovich is an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of “Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame in the Global Fight against Hunger.” She is currently a policy advisor at the Office of Global Food Security at the U.S. Department of State and has previously served as a AAAS S&T Fellow at the Office of Food for Peace at USAID, a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, a visiting scholar in the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University, and a visiting fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Kaitlyn Kimball, Owner, Sunset Farm & Director of Agriculture, CitySeed
Co-owner and co-founder of Sunset Farm, a USDA-certified organic fruit, vegetable, and flower farm located in Connecticut. Kaitlyn was formerly a high school English teacher for over ten years before transitioning to farming. Kaitlyn is passionate about racial equity, sustainability, and building community through food. Since 2023, Kaitlyn has also served as the director of agriculture at CitySeed, a food justice nonprofit located in New Haven. Kaitlyn directs all of the city’s farmers markets, as well as agricultural policy work. Kaitlyn has a master’s degree in organizational leadership from Quinnipiac University.
Jacob Koch, Critic, Yale School of Architecture & Sustainability Team, Bloomberg Associates
Jacob Koch works for the sustainability team at Bloomberg Associates, where he leads client engagements with city governments on a range of sustainability, climate, and resilience projects. He teaches an Urban Lab at the Yale School of Architecture focused on city governments and food policy. Jacob has a BA in political science from Yale University and a master’s in urban planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is on the advisory boards of Yale/City, CUNY Guttman Community College Urban Studies program, and the Emerging Leaders Council of the Regional Plan Association.
Chika Kondo, Mickey Leland International Fellow, Oxfam/Congressional Hunger Center
Chika Kondo is an expert in agrifood systems, gender, and sustainable agriculture. She holds a PhD from Kyoto University, where she focused on alternative food networks for equitable food access. As a Mickey Leland International Fellow, she designs livelihood programs centered on agroecology and value chain development while leading advocacy efforts on urban food systems and food system transformation. Previously, she founded a youth of color farmers’ cooperative in New Orleans, integrating youth organizing, food sovereignty, and solidarity economics to combat food insecurity and empower communities to grow their own food.
Gernot Laganda, Director for Climate & Sustainability, UNICEF
Gernot Laganda serves as director of climate & sustainability at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Prior to joining UNICEF, he held senior positions in global, regional and country operations with the World Food Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, and the United Nations Development Program. A geoscientist by training, Gernot has 25 years of experience with programs at the interface between humanitarian, development and climate action. He supports governments to analyze the effects of climate change on food systems and social sectors and make climate finance work for vulnerable communities. Prior to joining the UN, Gernot held posts with the Austrian Development Agency and NGOs supporting disaster relief and resilience projects in Afghanistan and Central Asia. He holds a M.Eng. degree in applied geosciences, a master’s degree in public policy, and postgraduate diplomas in disaster management and international development cooperation. Gernot is a 2016 Yale World Fellow and guest lecturer at Columbia University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Kelly McFarland, Director of Programs and Research, Georgetown University Institute for the Study of Diplomacy
Kelly McFarland is a U.S. diplomatic historian and director of programs and research at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, where he oversees the institute’s research agenda, teaches in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, and hosts ISD’s Diplomatic Immunity podcast. Prior to Georgetown, he was an intelligence analyst at the U.S. Department of State and a Presidential Briefing Book briefer for Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior State Department officials.
Johanna Mendelson-Forman, Distinguished Practitioner In Residence, American University
Johanna Mendelson Forman is a distinguished practitioner in residence at American University’s School of International Service and a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center. Her groundbreaking work on food in conflict zones is derived from her career as a practitioner and policymaker in the U.S. government, the UN and the World Bank. Her research focuses on gastrodiplomacy and social gastronomy, the use of food as a means of social impact and investment to communities at risk. Mendelson Forman is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She serves on the Kitchen Cabinet of the Food Program at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. She holds a J.D. from Washington College of Law at American University, a Ph.D. in Latin American history from Washington University, St. Louis, and a master’s of international affairs from Columbia University.
Luisa Metz, Research Assistant, Yale College
Luisa Metz is a senior in Yale College majoring in global affairs with a certificate in Chinese. She works at the Yale Sustainable Food Program (YSFP) as a culinary events manager and as a research assistant to Professor Kaete O’Connell. Her interests include international food systems, Sino-American and cross-strait relations, and technology competition in the Indo-Pacific.
Rebecca Middleton, Chief Advocacy and Engagement Officer, World Food Program USA
Rebecca Middleton serves as the chief advocacy and engagement officer at the World Food Program USA, where she and her team work to educate members of Congress and their staff on the importance of U.S. government support for the UN World Food Program. She brings more than 25 years of experience in policy, advocacy, and strategy to the role. Middleton combined her advocacy and management expertise with her longstanding passion for eradicating hunger in 2013 when she joined the Alliance to End Hunger as its COO. She became its executive director in 2016 and joined World Food Program USA in July 2020. Middleton holds a BA in political science and English from Mary Washington College. She serves on several boards, including as chair of Freedom Network USA and as treasurer of the Alliance to End Hunger.
Sarah Miller, Executive Director, CitySeed
Sarah Miller is a lifelong New Haven resident with over 20 years of non-profit and community leadership experience. As executive director of CitySeed, she is focused on strengthening and scaling the organization’s contributions to local food programs and systems. Sarah previously served as director of strategy at Clifford Beers and director of development and communications for the Institute of Cultural Affairs. She is also an elected member of the New Haven Board of Alders. Sarah holds a BA in literature from Yale and a Master of Social Work from UConn.
Kaete O’Connell, Assistant Director and Lecturer, Yale Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy
Kaete O’Connell is assistant director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and a lecturer in Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. A historian of the U.S. and the world, her research investigates the connection between food security and national security. Her upcoming book, “Tasting Freedom: U.S. Food Power, Occupied Germany, and the Origins of the Cold War,” will be published by UVA Press in 2026. She is currently editing a forum on food and U.S. foreign relations for Diplomatic History while also working on a digital humanities project that traces the evolution of language surrounding food and war in the postwar era. She holds a PhD in history from Temple University.
Ivy Pete, Global Food Fellow, Yale Sustainable Food Program
Ivy Pete is a Yale College junior studying ethnicity, race, and migration. She was born and raised in the interior Salish territories of Spokane, Washington, and her heritage is central to her work as a Paiute and Blackfeet woman. She holds a special interest in food sovereignty, spending her time away from school learning about traditional food ways and traditional ecological knowledge. She is honored and humbled to serve as an advocate of her people and empower Native youth to develop culturally rooted relationships to place and to each other.
Danielle Resnick, Senior Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute
Danielle Resnick is a senior research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Her research focuses on the political economy of agricultural and nutrition policy, food systems, and urban governance, with regional expertise in sub-Saharan Africa. She has authored or co-edited several books, including “The Political Economy of Food System Transformation: Pathways to Progress in a Polarized World” and “Ghana’s Economic and Agricultural Transformation: Past Performance and Future Prospects.” She also has served in several advisory roles, including for the World Bank’s Global Poverty and Equity Practice, the FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture Report, the UN’s High-Level Panel of Experts 2024 report on “Strengthening Urban and Peri-Urban Food Systems,” and the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition (GloPan).
Reggy St Fortcolin, Founder, Fridgeport
Reggy St Fortcolin is a food justice advocate and community organizer dedicated to expanding food access and land equity in Connecticut. He founded Fridgeport in May 2021, a mutual aid network combating food insecurity and waste through community refrigerators in Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford, serving 150–200 people daily and distributing over 200 tons of food. He is also a co-founder of the Liberated Land Cooperative, a collective of Black and Brown farmers advocating for equitable land access and is developing the Sovereign Land Trust to protect land for marginalized communities. St Fortcolin’s policy work includes HB6854, which created Connecticut’s first government-appointed food and nutrition analyst, responsible for addressing food insecurity, improving grant distribution, and supporting grocery stores in food deserts. He is currently leading efforts on Senate Bill 1418, which expands food security through universal free school meals and food as medicine, increased SNAP benefits, and stronger support for local farmers.
Ian Seavey, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
Ian Seavey is an assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Programs and Community Engagement at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He previously held a Brady-Johnson Fellowship in International Security Studies at Yale University. He earned his PhD in history from Texas A&M University in 2024. His research examines U.S. empire in the Caribbean through the lens of disaster relief, environmental policy, and rum production. His book manuscript under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, “Huracán del Norte: Disasters and US Colonialism in Twentieth Century Puerto Rico,” tells the story of how evolving ideas about disaster relief policy fundamentally shaped and continue to shape the colonial relationship between the Puerto Rico and the U.S. He has published articles in a variety of venues including the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, American Historical Association Perspectives, and the Journal of Environmental Hazards. His next project investigates the intersection of rum consumption and production with U.S. cultural empire throughout the twentieth century Caribbean. His research has been funded by the Harry S. Truman Library Institute, the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy, and Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.
Benjamin Siegel, Associate Professor of History, Boston University
Benjamin Siegel is a scholar of transnational economic life, politics, agriculture, and the environment. His work examines how people in modern states conceptualize, debate, and leverage their material and non-material resources, returning frequently to a geographic focus on South Asia and its entanglements with the wider world. His first book, “Hungry Nation: Food, Famine, and the Making of Modern India,” demonstrated how questions of food and scarcity structured Indian citizens’ understanding of welfare and citizenship; Siegel’s latest book, “The Ghost Ship: Pharmaceutical Opioids and Political Power in the Modern World,” is forthcoming in 2025 from Oxford University Press.
Emma Sky, Director, Yale International Leadership Center
Emma Sky is the founding director of Yale’s International Leadership Center. She is a lecturer at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs where she teaches courses on great power competition and cooperation, grand strategy and Middle East politics. Sky is a trustee of the HALO Trust, a humanitarian NGO that clears landmines. She is the author of the highly acclaimed “The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq” and “In a Time of Monsters: Travelling in a Middle East in Revolt.” Sky served as political advisor to the Commanding General of U.S. Forces in Iraq; as development advisor to the Commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan; as political advisor to the U.S. Security Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process; and as Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk for the Coalition Provisional Authority. She also worked in the Palestinian territories for a decade, managing projects to develop Palestinian institutions and to promote co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians. Sky has also provided technical assistance on poverty elimination, human rights, access to justice, security sector reform, and conflict resolution in the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Henry Tugendhat, PhD Candidate, Johns Hopkins University SAIS
Henry Tugendhat is an economist with the China team at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He focuses on issues related to China’s impact on conflict dynamics in Africa and Latin America. Tugendhat has worked on these issues for over a decade through previous employment at the Institute of Development Studies in the U.K., the China-Africa Research Initiative at Johns Hopkins University SAIS, and the World Bank Group’s macroeconomics, trade and investment team. His core areas of interest include conflict, economics, and telecommunications in the context of China-Africa and China-Latin America relations. Tugendhat lived and worked in China for three years and holds a master’s from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a bachelor’s from the University of Leeds. He is currently finishing his PhD at Johns Hopkins University SAIS.
Stephen Wood, Senior Scientist, The Nature Conservancy & Research Scientist, Yale School of the Environment
Stephen Wood is a senior scientist of agriculture and food systems at The Nature Conservancy and a research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. Steve’s work focuses on building a strong evidence base to support efforts to promote food production that benefits people and nature. He leads much of The Nature Conservancy’s global science on food systems, including science for the Regenerative Foodscapes strategy, global mapping of natural climate solutions science for agriculture and grazing lands, and coordinating the organization’s work on agricultural methane. Steve has a Ph.D. from Columbia University’s Department of Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology.
Jian Yi, President, Good Food Fund
Jian Yi founded the Good Food Fund, a pioneering organization driving food system transformation in China. It hosts an annual summit and operates a Food Systems Action Hub that identifies and awards best practices in the field. Additionally, it runs the Mama’s Kitchen project, honored as a global Top Visionary by the Rockefeller Foundation. Jian also co-founded the Global Accelerator for Food Systems Transformation at Peking University. An internationally acclaimed filmmaker, he was a 2009 Yale World Fellow and is currently a senior fellow in U.S.-China food systems at Harvard Law School.