Meet The Team

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Amanda teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the theory and practice of international agricultural development. Her research is focused on gender equity in international agricultural extension education.

Lena is a second-year Master's student in the International Agricultural Development program. She is originally from the Boston area, and graduated from Macalester College with a major in Latin American Studies and minors in Economics, Political Science and Portuguese. After five years working with immigrant rights organizations, she began her studies interested in the root causes of undocumented migration to the United States, and quickly learned how interlinked these issues are with the shortcomings of global agricultural and food systems. To learn more about these agrifood systems and their impact on vulnerable populations, she researched agricultural practices in Cuba and Puerto Rico, interned along the US/Mexico border, completed a semester of agricultural economics at a Brazilian university, and worked with the ecological branch of Argentina’s National Agricultural Technology Institute (INTA). For the past four years, Lena worked at a Minnesota-based food bank to connect immigrant families with food benefits, pilot child hunger intervention programming, and provide capacity-building support to hunger relief agencies in the Twin Cities.Lena is interested in Participatory Action Research and community-driven efforts to promote land sovereignty, sustainable agriculture and food access, particularly in Latin America. For her thesis, she is again working with INTA to support agroecology and food sovereignty in the southern peri-urban zone of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In her free time, Lena enjoys biking, hiking and attempting to take her cat on a walk.

Allison Rose is an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis studying International Agriculture Development. She was born and raised in San Diego, California. For as long as she can recall, she has felt a strong need to assist people as they mitigate and adapt to problems they face. Allison has also always used food and meals as her way to bring people together. At UC Davis, she has found a way to synchronize those passions through her IAD program. To accompany the knowledge she is acquiring in the classroom, Allison works at the UC Davis student farm in the ecological garden as a lead student farmer and for a graduate student in Dr. Crump’s International Agriculture Development lab as a student researcher. She feels especially excited because of how much she has loved previous international impact work completed through her fellowship at the Institute on Science for Global Policy, participation in a Global Farm Symposium through the UC Davis student farm, and by having a poem of hers published in a book with scholars from around the world. She was inspired by these experiences to apply for the Millenium Fellowship because they have shown her that she can use her passion for food and skills with people to create important and impactful projects in her community.