Jessica Fanzo, Ph.D. is a Professor of Climate and Food at Columbia University’s Climate School. She also serves as the Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative and is the Interim Director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI).

Before joining Columbia University, she was the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University. She held appointments in the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Berman Institute of Bioethics, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was the Director of Hopkins’ Global Food Policy and Ethics Program and the Director of Food & Nutrition Security at Hopkins’ Alliance for a Healthier World. From 2021 to 2022, Jess was the Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs at SAIS. She has also held positions at the Earth Institute, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the UN World Food Programme, Bioversity International, and the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya.

She leads the development of the Food Systems Dashboard and the Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative in collaboration with GAIN. From 2017 with some continuing into 2023, she has served on various collective endeavors, including the BIFAD Subcommittee on Systemic Solutions for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Food Systems for USAID, the High-Level Expert Group for the European Commission’s International Platform for Food Systems Science, Food Systems Economic Commission, the Cornell Atkinson Center’s Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation report, the Global Panel of Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition Foresight 2.0 report, and both the first and now second EAT-Lancet Commissions. She was also the Co-Chair of the Global Nutrition Report and Team Leader for the UN High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition. She currently serves in advisory roles for the Stockholm Resilience Center Council, the AgMIP Steering Council, and the Planetary Health Alliance Committee to name a few. Jessica has been an advisor for various organizations and governments, including the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the International Food Policy Research Institute, PATH, the Scaling Up Nutrition movement, the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition, USAID, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. She was the Editor-in-Chief for the Global Food Security Journal from 2018 to 2022 and Associate Editor for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition from 2019 to 2022.

With twenty years of research and program experience working in the field in sub-Saharan Africa, South and East Asia, and the United States, her area of expertise focuses on how transitioning food systems are impacting people’s access to healthy, environmentally sustainable, and equitable diets, and more broadly on the food-related livelihoods of people living in resource-constrained places in the context of climate change.

Jessica has over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 6 edited books, over 30 book chapters, and over 50 reports, manuals, and guidelines she has authored. To see her full list of publications, please explore here. In 2021, she published her first book, Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? with Johns Hopkins University Press and co-wrote Global Food Systems, Diets, and Nutrition: Linking Science, Economics, and Policy, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Jessica was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation’s Sustainable Diets Prize in 2012 for her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. She has a Ph.D. in Nutrition from the University of Arizona and completed a Stephen I. Morse postdoctoral fellowship in Immunology in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Columbia University.

See Jess’s CV for more information. She is also a lover of food, drink + goats. She also curates The Food Archive.