Cody Kugler

About

Cody Kugler is a project associate in Cornell University’s Department of Global Development on the Food Systems Global Change team (FSGC), which focuses on making food systems more adaptive, equitable, and efficient, and understanding the potential of food systems innovations to facilitate sustainable transition pathways. As a member of the FSGC’s Wild Future’s project, her research focuses on how innovations are developed, adopted at scale, and the methods to measure impact. 

Prior to working on the FSGC team, Cody had experience with various project management roles across several sectors. She started her career at JP Morgan as a project manager focused on transformation projects in the banking industry before she pivoted to international economics work which has spanned microfinance, crowdsourcing, and field-based community development work. Most recently she worked to scale a functional food start-up across Southeast Asia, while simultaneously building out their smallholder farming program. This experience fed her interest in agrifood technologies that could lead to high adoption rates for smallholder farmers. Throughout her roles, she has collaborated with numerous organizations such as WWF, UNDP, and USAID to design and implement livelihood programs. While at EnerGaia, her team won a Gates Foundation Grand Challenge Explorations grant in innovating global health and development research for “Creating spirulina microentrepreneurs to solve malnutrition” in Khulna, Bangladesh. She worked to establish similar programs in Indonesia and Thailand while liaising to develop similar spirulina farming programs in India, Ghana, and Peru. Prior to this experience, she worked with nonprofits in the US, Kenya, and Cambodia.