Kathleen Merrigan

		Kathleen Merrigan © Mark Morelli

Nutrition agriculture program has a new director

Kathleen Merrigan has joined the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy as a faculty member and director of the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program. She earned a Ph.D. in urban and environmental planning from MIT and a master's degree in public affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. She comes to Tufts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where most recently, she was administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service.

Merrigan has worked on a wide range of agricultural and food policy issues, including the development of the federal standard for organic food, and on matters related to biotechnology, sustainable agriculture, agricultural research and extension, pesticides, animal and plant health and agricultural appropriations. She currently serves on the advisory board for the Pew Initiative on Biotechnology. Prior to her appointment at the USDA, she was a policy analyst at the Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture.

Merrigan's international experience includes work on organic agriculture with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; with the Water Policy Institute of the Polytechnic University of Krakow on pesticides; and with the Netherlands Ministry of the Environment. She has written extensively on sustainable agriculture policy in the United States and is frequently invited to give congressional testimony on agriculture and environmental issues.