Three CFAES graduate students recently participated in the U.S. Borlaug Summer Institute on Global Food Security, an annual two-week-long educational program for graduate students attending U.S. institutions who are interested in developing a holistic understanding of the challenges surrounding global food security.
Vivian Bernau, a PhD student in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science; Dustin Homan, an MS student in the Department of Agricultural Communication, Education, and Leadership; and Susan Ndiaye, an MS student in the Department of Entomology were among 40 invited students (25 American and 15 international) from 21 other public universities selected from a competitive pool of applicants to attend the 2016 Borlaug Summer Institute, which was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
The institute provided an introduction to global food security and offered students the chance to work in an interdisciplinary fashion to address real-world development challenges and to interact with an array of faculty, practitioners and policymakers with extensive experience in integrated approaches to global problem solving. It was convened and delivered by Purdue University’s Center for Global Food Security from June 5-18.
“Each student who attended brought different expertise and experiences to the conversations, allowing us to gain new perspectives on issues including poverty, malnutrition, gender roles, post-harvest loss, and climate change,” said Ndiaye, who formerly interned at World Hunger Relief Inc. and served in the Peace Corps as an agricultural extension agent for three and a half years in Senegal. She added that as the world’s population continues to grow, the institute reminded her and her peers of the importance of coming together from a variety of disciplines to develop lasting solutions for a problem as large and complex as global food security.—International Programs in Agriculture