By Valeria San Juan
John Hoddinott is the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food & Nutrition Economics and Policy, a joint position in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and the Division of Nutritional Sciences. Hoddinott’s position was endowed by H. Edward Babcock, a farmer who became alarmed at poor nutritional conditions plaguing residents of upstate New York. As a way to address and combat these issues, Babcock decided to endow the professorship for someone interested in studying the interrelations between nutrition, health and agriculture.
As if hand-tailored for the position, Hoddinott’s interests lie in understanding the root causes of food insecurity, under-nutrition and poverty. He has focused his work on different interventions that seek to reduce these maladies, and is particularly interested in how these programs are designed and evaluated.
Hoddinott holds a wide array of experiences under his belt. He has worked in the fields of poverty dynamics, schooling, intra-household resource allocation and labor markets. His work has taken him to communities around the world – including like Kenya, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Bangladesh – where he has conducted research and presented results to audiences that have included members of the U.S. Congress, Canadian parliamentarians, NGOs and donor agencies.
Hoddinott grew up in Toronto, where he obtained his bachelor’s degree at the University of Toronto. He continued his studies at the University of Oxford doing research on programs that worked to alleviate poverty and malnutrition in marginalized communities. His work at Oxford ultimately led him to a research position at the International Food Policy Research Institute for 12 years, where he worked on the intersections of economics, food and human nutrition.
Currently, Dr. Hoddinott is working on analyzing the results of research projects conducted in conjunction with IFPRI in Bangladesh studying the effect of cash transfers, food transfers, or cash transfer and intensive nutrition intervention, on households diets and the nutritional status of children. During his time at Cornell, Hoddinott is looking forward to new collaborations with faculty and staff at both Dyson and Nutritional Sciences. Hoddinott said he is also excited about working with graduate and undergraduate students.
Valeria San Juan is a student writer in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
