Dr. M. Jahi Chappell directs Michigan State University’s Center for Regional Food Systems, and is the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Endowed Chair of Food & Society and Professor in MSU’s Department of Community Sustainability. He has previously served as the Executive Director of SAAFON (the Southeastern African-American Farmers’ Organic Network); Executive Director of the 45-year old thinktank, Food First/the Institute for Food & Development Policy; as an Associate Professor of Agroecology and Agricultural Policy at Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR); as Senior Staff Scientist at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy; and as Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Justice and Associate Director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver.
Dr. Chappell is the author of the award-winning book Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond, and a co-author of Agroecology Now! Transformations Towards More Just and Sustainable Food Systems (written with Colin Anderson, Janneke Bruil, Csilla Kiss, and Michel Pimbert). He has published over 50 scientific and popular articles and book chapters, and worked with communities, allies and movements in the United States and internationally, including the National Family Farm Coalition, Farm Aid, La Vía Campesina, the IPC, the Agroecology Fund, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He is a founding Board Member of the Open Source Seed Initiative, current Board Vice Chair for the international grassroots foundation Thousand Currents, Board Member for IALA-Puerto Rico, and former Board Member for Growing Gardens, Growing Hope, and the Agroecology Fund. His academic pieces have been published in journals ranging from Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and Conservation Letters, to Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences and Nature Climate Change.
Chappell’s approach and interests fall under what has been called political agroecology. His academic qualifications include a Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and a Bachelor’s of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, with subsequent postdoctoral work at Cornell University in the Department of Science & Technology Studies.
See more information about Jahi, CRFS, and Michigan State’s Department of Community Sustainability at foodsystems.msu.edu and csus.msu.edu.
Beginning to End Hunger 
Hello,
My name is Sam Marquit, I am an independent ‘green’ contractor and co-author of Fair Marquit Value I am wondering if you’re interested in featuring me on your blog because I would love a chance to speak with your readers about the idea of environmentally responsible tourism as it’s applied in modern day travel and stay.
If you think this topic, or any other for that matter, would be of interest to your readers, please let me know and I can begin drafting up something that I believe will mesh with your blog very well.
I look forward to hearing back from you; hopefully we can work together on spreading the word on important topics like this as they relate to environmental awareness!
I look forward to hearing from you,
Sam
smarquit@gmail.com
oh what a day! Such happy findings! It sounds all so interesting and existing! I did a research a gizillion years ago (field data collected in 2004) in an amazon village in Bolivia, how i would have loved to find something like your lab when i was developing my methodology. My subject was conservation and sustainable livelihoods in this particular village and it aimed to assess the relationship of each family with the forest and to create an index to reflect how good or how bad this relationship was towards biodiversity conservation.. Nobody in my uni understood what i was doing, my dad who was a statistics professor, and a friend, a Mathematician and Calculus Professor were the only light i had to guide me.. it turned out great but since then i haven’t been in touch with anything much to do with the subject.. I’ll be following you eagerly! Oh the joy 🙂
latinamericanwomenwearearrings — glad to have you as a reader!!!!!! Such enthusiasm always makes what can seem like a lonely, uphill endeavor into more of being part of a larger community! As you may know from the blog, I’m now in an NGO and no longer running the AUE Lab, but I did enjoy being able to provide a “home” for students like you–and students like I was, when I was a student and had the luck to find John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto’s group. The one thing John said to me that almost convinced me to stay in academia was “But who will mentor the students like you?”
Fortunately, there are many people doing great work out there, more and more truly interdiscilpinarily, but I know that too many also find themselves in the position you were in! Hope your current situation finds you well and satisfied!
~Jahi