Experts

Daniela Baeza Breinbauer

Daniela is a Project Manager and Researcher at LSE Consulting. She leads LSE Consulting’s Food Systems and Security Hub (FSSH) and oversees projects in the fields of Food Security, Environmental Economics; Development Economics; and Human Rights.

By training, she is a Development and Environmental Economist with a background in Human Rights and Science Policy. She has previously consulted for a variety of government and non-government institutions including the FAO, WFP, European Commission, EU Committee of the Regions, U.S. Government, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the Government of India, among others.

Much of her current work regards various areas of food security - having recently acted as a Senior Investigator on a project for the US representation to the UN FAO titled “The Future of Modern Agriculture”, as well as a Senior Researcher on a project for the UN Food Systems Summit Action Track 5 on Resilience, and as a Researcher on a project for GAIN investigating city-level sustainable food policy. Finally, and most recently, she has completed a project for the European Parliament investigating zoonotic disease risks of livestock farming practices across the EU.

Dr Declan Conway

Declan is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute, where he leads the Sustainable Natural Resources Group. Declan’s research cuts across water, climate and society, with a strong focus on adaptation and the water-energy-food nexus. Originally a geographer, Declan draws on insights from different disciplines to pursue problem focused research. He has over 20 years of experience working in the UK/Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Declan’s research funding has included the EU, UK departments DFID, Defra and DECC, UK NERC and ESRC, US NSF and the World Bank. Current research projects include Climate resilience in the UK wine sector – CREWS-UK, Development Corridors Partnership and Future Climate For Africa – Climate Risk Synthesis. Recently completed projects include UMFULA (Uncertainty reduction in Models For Understanding deveLopment Applications) and The economic impact of El Niño related floods and drought on small and medium enterprises in Botswana, Kenya and Zambia.

Dr Stephanie Levy

Stephanie is a development economist with over 15 years of experience in rural development and poverty reduction policies in Africa and South-East Asia. Stephanie has an extensive experience of modelling and policy analysis using simulation tools and quantitative analysis methods. As an academic researcher, she worked on agricultural development policies, including natural resources management, public investment in rural infrastructure and services, food price and poverty reduction.

Her PhD research examines the use of natural resource revenue to finance pro-poor growth strategies. This work is applied to the case of Chad using a general equilibrium model to compare different public investment strategies. She has worked for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the London Business School before joining the Overseas Development Institute in 2005, where she conducted studies on rural development and social protection for the World Bank, the United Nation Programme for Development and for DFID.

She joined LSE as a Guest Lecturer in 2014. Her current research focuses on the local economic impact of social protection, including cash transfers and graduation packages, the complementarity between rural development policies and social transfers and the impact of financial shocks and stresses on household behaviour. She currently works with UNDP and the Government of Cambodia on a randomized control trial that aims at evaluating the impact of graduation-based social protection policies.
 

Dr Stefania Lovo

Stefania is an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Reading. Her research interests are in development economics, environmental economics, political economy, and policy impact evaluation. In particular, she has studied how deforestation interacts with ethnic diversity and institutional quality, how tenure insecurity, climate shocks and crop choices affect individual and household welfare and how environmental policies and decentralisation impact on firm location, international trade and firm performance.

She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Globalisation Research (Queen Mary), a Senior Research Associate of LSE Consulting, and a member of the Trade Policy Hub. She has collaborated with the World Bank, WWF-UK, and the Directorate General for Trade of the European Commission.

Dr Karlygash Kuralbayeva

Karlygash is a Lecturer in Economics at the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Her research interests include the design of public policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in transition to net-zero emissions economy.

She has engaged with policymakers on issues related to green growth and social aspects of just transitions, impacts of wider economic and societal transformations on the food system and its sustainability and collaborated with the EU Commission, WWF-UK, Vienna Institute for International Dialogue and Cooperation, World Bank, GGGI and OECD, among others. Karlygash is an associate of the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment (LSE) and holds DPhil in Economics from Oxford University. 

Ms Catarina Heeckt

Catarina is a Policy Fellow at LSE Cities, interested in how we can accelerate the transition towards more resilient and inclusive cities around the world. She works on policy-oriented research projects that inform and influence decision-making, particularly in relation to urban environmental transitions, sustainable mobility, low-carbon urban development and urban governance.

Catarina joined LSE Cities in 2012 to work on the Economics of Green Cities programme and has since contributed to a significant number of reports, projects and policy initiatives, including work on the co-benefits of urban climate action for C40.

She has experience advising local and national governments from Mexico to Ethiopia, and has collaborated closely with a wide range of organisations including the European Environment Agency, the OECD, the World Resources Institute, DFID, UN-Habitat, UCLG, ICLEI, PwC, and Arup. Catarina leads LSE Cities’ contribution to the Coalition for Urban Transitions, a major global initiative supporting national governments to secure economic prosperity and tackle the climate crisis by transforming cities. In this capacity, her current research focuses on the role that national transport, land use and housing policies can play in shaping compact, connected and clean urban development.

In addition to a long-standing interest in sustainable urban mobility and transport equity, Catarina’s other research interests include urban food systems, green and blue infrastructure and climate adaptation in cities.

Dr Jeremy Brice

Jeremy's research focuses on risk, resilience and digital innovation within agri-food supply chains, and on the regulation and governance of food safety, authenticity and sustainability. Over the past decade he has led research projects funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy and the UK Food Standards Agency.

Jeremy is currently based within the Oxford Martin School where his research examines sustainability transitions in the meat and livestock sectors He holds a DPhil in Geography from the University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellowship in Economic Sociology at LSE.

Dr Fred Basso

Fred's research is driven by an interdisciplinary approach to the real world, fuelled by his academic and professional backgrounds (European Law (BSc), Political Economy (Agrégation), Organisational Studies (MSc), Consumer Psychology (PhD).

He has also completed academic training in brain imaging data analysis (fMRI). He is deeply committed to ethical, societal and policy-making issues (Public Health and Social Policy).

Dr Tony Barnett 

Tony is an interdisciplinary social scientist currently based at the Royal Veterinary College, where he is Professor of Social Sciences, and the LSE Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa, where he is a Visiting Professor.

He was previously based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has worked for six years as ESRC Professorial Research Fellow at LSE. He is co-investigator on the One Heath Poultry Hub, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). This is an interdisciplinary research project addressing the need to meet rising demand for poultry meat and eggs in developing countries, while minimising risk to international public health. This work is based in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Vietnam and has implications for the management of zoonotic disease risk in Africa and elsewhere.

In addition to his post at the Royal Veterinary College and his visiting professorship at LSE, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester.

Mr Sanchayan Banerjee

Sanchayan is a doctoral candidate in behavioural and environmental economics at LSE. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and teaches in the field of applied environmental and developmental economics and quantitative methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the school.

Sanchayan has developed the economic and psychological theory of Nudge Plus in his doctoral research. He has evaluated this theory of nudge plus against nudges, boosts, and thinks in promoting pro-environmental behaviour, with increasing the uptake of low-carbon foods as a case in point.

He has been awarded many prestigious scholarships and grants for his current research, namely the LSE Robert and Dilys Rawson doctoral scholarship, the Knowledge and Exchange Impacts award for outreach of Nudge Plus and the RGS-IBG Frederick Soddy postgraduate award.

Ms Jeanne Firth

Jeanne is a PhD candidate in Human Geography & Urban Studies. Before coming to LSE, she served on the founding team of the Grow Dat Youth Farm in New Orleans, Louisiana and worked as the organisation's first Assistant Director. She was previously the Co-Chair of the New Orleans Food Policy Advisory Committee and taught at the Payson School for International Development at Tulane University. Her doctoral dissertation, ‘Foodscape Philanthropy in Post-Katrina New Orleans’, explores the emergent philanthropic worlds of chefs: how their charitable institutions are created, practiced and contested, and how their efforts are shaped by an intersectional politics of race, class and gender.

Philanthropy, as part of private sector engagement more broadly, is playing an increasingly important role in development and thus must be considered an essential area of study in the geographies of humanitarian aid and assistance. Her research utilises an intersectional feminist lens in an ethnographic study of both elite-led and community-based foodscape interventions in New Orleans more than a dozen years after Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federal levee system.