Bio
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.
Courses
- Global Food Systems and Policy (on-line)
This course reviews the political landscape of food in high-, middle- and low-income countries and their interconnected food systems. Ensuring food security for the global population is a grand challenge and one that has many contentious issues. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. In order for the global population to be food secure, we need functional, sustainable food systems. However, food systems and the political framing of how they function, are complex networks of individuals and institutions. Depending on policies, food systems determine the availability, affordability and nutritional quality of the food supply, and influence the amount and combination of foods that people are willing and able to consume. Agriculture-led economic growth of countries, the health and nutrition of populations, and environmental sustainability of landscapes are all significant factors of how public policies are made and directed. Conflicts regarding land, technology, natural resources, subsidies, inequity and trade are all being played out in the food policy arena. Students who take this course will become familiar with both domestic and international food policy processes and typologies along with the key players in the international landscape, and will be able to critically analyze and debate how policy and science interact with regard to food security.
- Sustainable Development in the Era of Climate Disruption (on-line)
Students will get an introduction and participate in critical discussions of basic concepts, science and debate about climate change and how climate will impact sustainable development, climate change leadership, science, power and politics. This will cover the scientific overview of climate change over geological and historical time, its impact on the availability of basic necessities like freshwater, food security, and energy and a number of case studies that illustrate different societies interaction, adaptation and collapse in relation to climate change. Thereafter, students will learn global, regional and local efforts being undertaken to adapt and mitigate climate change and how these efforts are shaping the global development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. There will be case studies understanding the political and ethical contentions of climate and sustainable development and how present and future scenarios could impact food prices, conflict, infrastructure, migration, trade and geopolitical relationships.
