Rebecca Nelson, Ph.D.
Cornell University

Sorting out Toxic Food Systems: Selected Strategies to Reduce Mycotoxin Exposure in low-resource Settings

Rebecca Nelson is Professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University. She co-chairs the Cornell Atkinson Center’s Food Security Working Group and the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems thematic group of the UN’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Her laboratory works on plant disease resistance and mycotoxin management, and on circular economy for organic resources, with a special interest in resource recovery from sanitation to agriculture. From 2000-2021, she served as Scientific Director for The McKnight Foundation’s Collaborative Crop Research Program, a grant-making program focused on supporting smallholder farmers’ agroecological transitions in Africa and in the Andes. She has worked at the International Potato Center in Lima, Peru, and at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. Rebecca received her BA from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She was a MacArthur Fellow from 1996-2001.