working where science and society converge, empowering vulnerable communities to achieve safe, nourishing food systems for all
Anthony Wenndt, Ph.D is the Technical Officer for Reaching the Very Poor and Programme Lead, Social Protection at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), based in Washington, DC, USA.
Based in Washington, DC, Anthony supports GAIN's efforts to improve the diets of the very poorest and most marginalized communities. His background is in community-based participatory research and context-sensitive food system interventions in smallholder communities, with particular emphasis on mitigating dietary mycotoxin exposure among low-resource rural populations. He holds a PhD in Plant Pathology & Plant-Microbe Biology from Cornell University.
Anthony’s research operates according to the understanding that intensely-local, community-based inquiries are fully compatible with rigorous, replicable science, and that field-derived knowledge is fundamentally required to match heterogeneous contexts with truly meaningful solutions. His dissertation research centered around the critical need to extend farm and food innovations to resource-poor smallholder communities, using meaningful methods and metrics that are enriched by local knowledge. He has worked to explore the utility of participatory research and farmer research networks (FRN) in mobilizing vulnerable populations against food safety constraints that pose real threats to livelihoods and nutrition.
Anthony also contributed to the USAID-supported EatSafe program at GAIN, he supports the design and implementation of food safety research geared toward the empowerment of consumers and vendors serviced by traditional food market systems in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world. Before joining GAIN in 2021, Anthony was engaged in conceptualizing and measuring institutional capacity gains as a postdoctoral research associate at the Tata Cornell Institute for Agriculture & Nutrition, under the USAID Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement. The Innovation Lab aims to enhance nutritional quality, resilience, and agronomic performance of crop systems in East and West Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
radically local solutions
Participatory research can leverage diverse perspectives for food safety intervention
Smallholder farmers deserve to know how mycotoxins affect the integrity of their food systems.
What are mycotoxins?
Having engaged with farmers in South and Central Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, Anthony has devoted his career to designing systems of inquiry and innovation that work for resource-poor communities.
Holding degrees in both sciences and humanities, he challenges the notion that innovation is confined to the Ivory Tower. He aims to elevate systems of interdisciplinary investigation that translate scientific advances into community-level outcomes, answering questions that farmers truly care about. Anthony envisions a new era of science, wherein research agendas are driven locally but feed into global systems of change.