Jessica Fanzo

Jessica Fanzo is James Anderson Professor of Food Policy & Climate at SAIS Europe. Before coming to SAIS Bologna in 2023, Professor Fanzo was a Professor of Climate and Food and the Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative at Columbia University’s Climate School. Prior to that, she served as the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University. She has also held positions at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN), the UN World Food Programme, Bioversity International, the Earth Institute, the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya, and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

She has participated in various 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 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. Fanzo was a board member of the Integrated Partnership Board of the CGIAR, the International Livestock Research Institute, and the Alliance for Bioversity and CIAT until the end of 2025 and continues to serve as the co-Chair of the Executive Committee for the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement. She currently leads the development of the Food Systems Dashboard and the Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative.

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's College of Physicians and Surgeons. She became an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2024.