Jagger Harvey, PhD
Research Professor
Director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for the Reduction of Post-Harvest Loss
105D Waters Hall
Manhattan, KS 66506
Ph: 785-477-4198
Biography
Growing up around farming communities in Haiti and rural Washington State, I have sought to cultivate expertise with direct relevance to transforming diverse food systems. My formal molecular plant pathology training was conducted at the University of California Davis, The Sainsbury Laboratory and Cambridge University. Since 2009, I have led donor-funded agricultural research for development programs in more than a dozen African, Asian and Latin American countries. This has included: working at the Biosciences eastern and central Africa-International Livestock Research Institute Hub in Nairobi, Kenya, from 2009-2016; leading the Australian Government funded African Food Security Initiative flagship project, which worked with national maize breeders of Kenya and Tanzania and established a food safety research platform, to address aflatoxin contamination; serving as director of the US Agency for International Development-funded Feed the Future Innovation Lab for the Reduction of Post-Harvest Loss (PHLIL) at Kansas State University since 2016; serving as Principal Investigator of the PHLIL Nepal project; and serving as the research lead on a US Department of Agriculture-Foreign Agriculture Service McGovern-Dole Food for Education project in Malawi, led by Nascent Solutions.
I have extensive experience in catalyzing and leading impact-oriented partnerships to address key food system challenges. This has included a range of multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral international agriculture programs that have succeeded in enhancing partner country research capacity, characterized food system challenges, developed locally produced interventions, and piloted them into scaling with inclusive benefits. The programs I have led include partners from governments, the private sector, civil society and other key stakeholder groups. In 2021, I graduated from the Food Systems Leadership Institute, the flagship training program for Land Grant university leadership. Given the unfolding food security crisis, I am intensely focused on sustainable mitigation of production and post-harvest losses at scale, with inclusive benefits across societies.
Education
- PhD in Genetics, University of California Davis, 2005
- BSc in Biology; Natural Sciences & Mathematics, Washington and Lee University, 1998
Research
Director, Feed the Future Innovation Lab for the Reduction of Post-Harvest Loss (PHLIL)
Research on mycotoxin and other post-harvest issues in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi and Nepal; PI for Nepal and Malawi projects.
Extension & Teaching
Supporting and contributing to capacity and scaling efforts under PHLIL.