Jessica Fanzo is Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Food Ethics & Policy
Director of the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program at SAIS Europe


Jessica Fanzo is the Interim Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. Fanzo also directs the Johns Hopkins Global Food Policy and Ethics program and serves as Food and Nutrition Security director at Johns Hopkins Alliance for a Healthier World. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the co-chair of the Global Nutrition Report and the United Nations (UN) High Level Panel of Experts on Food Systems and Nutrition. Before joining the university, she held positions at Columbia University, the Earth Institute, Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, the UN World Food Programme, Bioversity International, and the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya.

Fanzo was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation’s Sustainable Diets Prize in 2012 due to her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. She has worked as an advisor for various organizations and governments, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), PATH, the Scaling Up Nutrition movement (SUN), UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Bank, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

With more than 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 the impact of transitioning food systems on healthy, environmentally sustainable and equitable diets, and more broadly on the livelihoods of people living in resource-constrained places. In 2021, she published her first book, Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?, and co-wrote Global Food Systems, Diets, and Nutrition: Linking Science, Economics, and Policy. Fanzo holds a PhD 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.