I've gained a new fellowship: JIF Fellow in Global Food Security

I've gained a new fellowship: JIF Fellow in Global Food Security

Some new projects for the next five years.

October 10, 2025

career research

I am delighted to share my new role as the John Innes Foundation Fellow in Global Food Security, tasked with unlocking research findings to benefit a great many farmers and consumers🧑‍🌾

In addition to my research with the UK-CGIAR Science Centre working on healthier and more resilient wheat for Egypt, Kenya and Pakistan, this new role will involve four new projects:

  1. Enabling the update of safe grasspea across Ethiopia: Strengthening breeding resources and seed systems to put climate-smart, safe grasspea into the hands of hundreds of thousands of farmers in the next five years - lots of exciting climate-smart opportunity crops-meets-grassroots seed system work here.
  2. Working with M-Omulimisa to deploy a knowledge-sharing & investment platform for Ugandan smallholders: Co-designing and evaluating a farmer-facing platform that links smallholders with bundled information and technologies. The particularly exciting part is making this a two-way equitable knowledge ecosystem to further empower and support farmers.
  3. Building climate-smart resilience in South Asia (India & Nepal): Integrating climate forecasts, economics, crop science and nutrition to generate actionable adaptation strategies for local food systems. Again, there’s a great mix here of combining cutting edge research with local climate resilience movements.
  4. More with UK agriculture too as it’s been fascinating working with Christopher Darby and experts across John Innes Centre, Rothamsted Research and University of East Anglia on what’s required to bring healthier varieties to consumers - and not often I get to work on UK agriculture.

By combining this new role with my current UK-CGIAR position, I’ll be working to bring impact from research discoveries for communities from research across Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nepal, Pakistan, Uganda and the UK - an honour to work with such diverse communities.

It’s also a real joy to have this chance to continue working with Arjan Verschoor (NISD and UEA DEV) and the excellent team at across Norwich Institute for Sustainable Development, DEV and Norwich Research Park.

Here’s to the next five years!