Global Sustainable Dietary Transition: Advances and Challenges

• Listed in the “National Top-notch Young Professionals” of China and the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientists;
• Principal investigator for projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (General Program) and the "brain bank" of the Korea National Research Foundation's “Brain Pool” program;
• Associate Editor for International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment and Biofuel Research Journal; Editorial Board Member for journals such as Cell Reports Sustainability, Nexus and Carbon Footprints;
• Member of the Industrial Ecology Professional Committee of the Ecological Society of China and the Resource Flow and Management Research Committee of the China Natural Resources Society.

Research Interests:

Industrial ecology and sustainable ecology, with a focus on sustainable agricultural food systems and analysis of carbon peak and carbon neutrality pathways, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and environmental footprint analysis of emerging technologies at national and industry levels

Topic:

Diet Change Is Difficult, So What Should We Do?

Jessica Fanzo has worked as an advisor for numerous international organizations, including the International Food Policy Research Institute, USAID, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization. She also collaborates with governments to regain food security in post-conflict regions through evidence-based food policy and governance.

She 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 was also elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2024.

She currently leads the development of the Food Systems Dashboard and the Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative in collaboration with the Global Alliance of Improved Nutrition, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Cornell University. She currently serves on the Integrated Partnership Board of the CGIAR and the Executive Committee of the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement. She has participated in numerous other collective endeavors, including the Food Systems Economic Commission, the Global Panel of Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition Foresight 2.0 report, the Lancet Commission on Anaemia, and the EAT-Lancet Commissions 1 and now 2. 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.

Research Interests:

Climate Change, Food Systems, Diet, Nutrition, Environment

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William Masters leads the Food Prices for Nutrition project that computes the cost and affordability of healthy diets, and the IMMANA Fellowships program among other initiatives. From 2011 to 2014 he served as chair of the Friedman School’s Department of Food and Nutrition Policy, and before coming to Tufts was a faculty member in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University (1991-2010), and also at the University of Zimbabwe (1989-90), Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government (2000) and Columbia University (2003-04). He is former editor-in-chief of the journal Agricultural Economics (2006-2011), and an elected Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) from which he received the Bruce Gardner Memorial Prize for Applied Policy Analysis (2013), the Publication of Enduring Quality Award (2014), the Quality of Research Discovery Award (2019) and the Quality of Communications Award (2022). At Tufts his courses on economics of agriculture, food and nutrition were recognized with student-nominated, University-wide teaching awards in 2019 and 2022. He is coauthor of the new textbook Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Research Interests:

Economics and Policy Analysis for Agriculture, Food and Nutrition

Topic:

Food Choice and Access to Healthy, Sustainable Diets: Evidence from Retail Prices, Diet Costs and Affordability Worldwide

Melissa Pflugh Prescott is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She completed her PhD in Public Health at the New York University and a postdoctoral fellowship at Colorado State University. Dr. Prescott is a registered dietitian nutritionist. Her past experiences include managing a school-based obesity prevention program across seven elementary schools located in Harlem and Washington Heights, NYC. Dr. Prescott's research focuses on food-related behaviors at the intersection of nutrition security and environmental sustainability.  She investigates strategies to improve nutrition security while mitigating the negative impact of the food system on the environment (e.g. food waste). Dr. Prescott's research is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Science Foundation.

Research Interests:

Food-Related Behaviors, Nutrition Security, Environmental Sustainability

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