The State of Food Security at Home and Abroad

About

Join us for a panel discussion led by LBJ experts on what is driving food insecurity in the world today and the solutions that we can put in place both in our local and global communities. We are hosting this event in celebration of Texas International Education Week!

International inspired light bites provided!

Free and open to the public.

LBJ South Lobby

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Panelists:

Dr. Erin Lentz

Erin Lentz is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. She teaches on research and empirical methods, development policy, gender and development, and food policy. Her research explores food security; early warning systems; gender, nutrition, and agriculture linkages; and U.S. food aid and food assistance policies.

Dr. Lentz is currently pursuing four research agendas. First, she is an established authority on U.S. food aid and food assistance policy. For nearly two decades, she has studied donor responses to food insecurity in low-income countries. This research informed her 2018 congressional testimony on reforming food aid. Second, she researches innovative approaches to improving early warning for food insecurity crises, with a focus on leveraging real-time data and machine learning techniques. Third, she analyzes the links between hunger, gender and nutrition. With collaborators she developed the Women's Empowerment in Nutrition Index. Having validated the Index in South Asia, she is now preparing to validate it in Kenya. Fourth, she is developing a collaborative, community-based research project exploring the social life of famine through collecting oral histories of survivors of the 1974-5 famine in rural, northern Bangladesh.

Dr. Lentz received a Fulbright fellowship to Bangladesh to research the secondary effects of food aid in local communities. She has worked or consulted with CARE, the United Nations World Food Programme and numerous other international NGOs. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology and M.S. in applied economics and management from Cornell University.

Dr. Catherine (Kate) Weaver

Catherine (Kate) Weaver is Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Co-Director of Innovations for Peace and Development at The University of Texas at Ausin. She is a distinguished scholar and founder of the Next Generation Scholars Program at the Strauss Center for International Security & Law. She previously served as LBJ's associate dean for students, associate dean for academics, and graduate advisor for the Ph.D. and MGPS programs.