International Development

FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.

They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.

FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.

FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.

Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Fulbright and BAEF postdoctoral fellow 2012-2013
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Karen Del Biondo is a 2012-2013 postdoctoral scholar at CDDRL. Her research is funded with a Fulbright-Schuman award and a postdoctoral grant from the Belgian-American Educational Foundation (BAEF). She holds an MA in Political Science (International Relations) from Ghent University and an MA in European Studies from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In 2007-2008 she obtained a Bernheim fellowship for an internship in European affairs at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Permanent Representation to the EU. 

Karen Del Biondo obtained her PhD at the Centre for EU Studies, Ghent University in September 2012 with a dissertation entitled ‘Norms, self-interest and effectiveness: Explaining double standards in EU reactions to violations of democratic principles in sub-Saharan Africa’. Her PhD research was funded by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research (FWO). Apart from her PhD research, she has been involved in the research project ‘The Substance of EU Democracy Promotion’ (Ghent University/University of Mannheim/Centre of European Policy Studies) and has published on the securitisation of EU development policies. In January 2011 she conducted field research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her postdoctoral research will focus on the comparison between EU and US democracy assistance in sub-Saharan Africa.

Karen Del Biondo’s recent publications include: ‘Security and Development in EU External Relations: Converging, but in which direction?’ (with Stefan Oltsch and Jan Orbie), in S. Biscop & R. Whitman (eds.) Handbook of European Union Security, Routledge (2012); ‘Democracy Promotion Meets Development Cooperation: The EU as a Promoter of Democratic Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa’, European Foreign Affairs Review, Vol. 16, N°5, 2011, 659-672; and ‘EU Aid Conditionality in ACP Countries. Explaining Inconsistency in EU Sanctions Practice’, Journal of Contemporary European Research, Vol. 7, N°3, 2011, 380-395.

Walter H. Shorenstein
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall, Room E301
616 Serra St.
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

(650) 798-9129 (650) 723-6530
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Visiting Scholar
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James (Mingjian) Chen is the chairman of Hollyhigh International Capital, the first investment banking firm specializing in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in Mainland China. He is also an adviser of the Beijing Olympics organization. Chen is a member of the liaison committee in the China National Democratic Construction Association, the chairman of the M&A Elite Club, as well as a member of the Fuping Foundation for poverty alleviation. He also serves as the chief editor of the China M&A Review, and has published Winning the Deal and M&A Revolution.

Chen graduated from Tsinghua University’s Department of Economics and Management in 1993. After graduation, he worked as a trader at China Great Wall Financial Company for several years. He then established Tsinghua Unisplendour and Hollyhigh Investment Company, in 1997 and in 1998 respectively. In addition to his work at Hollyhigh, Chen is actively engaged in M&A projects for international corporations, such as Lafarge, Shell, SK, and Scottish & Newcastle.

Chen’s deal between Teda and the Meilun Group was used as the first M&A case study at Tsinghua University. He has lectured at many renowned institutions, including Harvard University and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

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In September, CDDRL's Program on Social Entrepreneurship (PSE) welcomed its second class of Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS) who hail from Malaysia, South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area. Using the law as a vehicle for social change, this group is collaboratively working to advance the rights of women, minority groups and refugees around the world.

The three SEERS will spend the fall quarter in residence at Stanford connecting to the academic community through a course taught at the Stanford Law School - Law, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Change - by PSE Faculty Director Deborah L. Rhode.

An international figure recognized for her work to help change domestic laws in Malaysia, Zainah Anwar helped launch two ground-breaking civil society organizations working to promote women's rights in Islam. Anwar founded Sisters in Islam in Malaysia and its pioneering work led to the creation of Musawah, a global movement of equality and justice in the Muslim family. 

A social justice activist in South Africa, Mazibuko Jara works to support sustainable rural development for communities residing in the Eastern Cape province. Founder of the Ntinga Ntaba ka Ndoda organization, Jara protects the practice of customary law and the interests of rural African women. As a spokesperson for the Democratic Left Front, Jara also works to bring together anti-corporate social justice movements in South Africa challenging the government and powerful interest groups.   

A lawyer in the San Francisco Bay Area, Emily Arnold-Fernández works to defend refugee rights and transform the lives of refugee communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Founder of the organization Asylum Access, Fernández empowers refugees to build a new life in their new homes by providing legal aid, community legal empowerment, policy advocacy and strategic litigation.

The three SEERS will spend the quarter engaging the student population at Stanford, pursuing their own research agenda and taking some time to reflect on their work and next steps. CDDRL will be hosting a public event with the SEERS on Nov. 14 at 5 pm in the Bechtel conference room at Encina Hall to introduce them more formally to the Stanford community.

 

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Faculty, staff, researchers, and friends welcome - come view the diverse research and educational programs FSI offers

The 2012 FSI Orientation and Open House will take place in the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. Take advantage of this annual opportunity to meet FSI's faculty, staff, and researchers, and explore their diverse educational and research programs.

FSI's centers and programs have prepared informative posters and electronic presentations, capturing the timely and exciting work currently in progress throughout the institute.

Food and beverages will be served. We look forward to welcoming you.

Bechtel Conference Center

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Jennifer Burney, named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2011, continues her work on agricultural solutions for struggling farmers. She observes, for example, that “as great as local organic food may be in my own kitchen, we’ll never feed the whole world that way. Like it or not, ‘Big Agriculture’ is why we’ve been able to sustain a hungry planet; and thanks to investments in technology, significant climate impact has been mitigated.” One key contribution she made was introducing solar irrigation to farmers in Benin, Africa.

Click here to read full interview.

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beninsolarpanel self Marshall Burke
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Despite some interesting research on crime and violence in Latin American countries (particularly Colombia), there is still a relative dearth of policy-oriented research. People interested in these subjects lack a convenient means to access the emerging research in these areas, or to pool data across countries and contexts.  Scholars within particular sub-fields are routinely engaged in separate conversations that do not sufficiently leverage complementarities in methods and substantive areas. This project will addres these gaps by delivering a first-rate electronic resource making it easy to pool data, to share research, and to engage audiences within and beyond academia. We also want to make it easier for policymakers in the United States and Latin America to learn about cutting-edge, policy-oriented research addressing the problems before them. 

CISAC Conference Room

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar Professor and Deane F. Johnson Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School; Co-Director of CISAC; FSI Senior Fellow; CDDRL Affiliated Faculty;FSE Affiliated Faculty Speaker

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science, FSI senior fellow, Director of Program on Poverty and Governance Speaker
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Poverty stands prominently at the intersection of water scarcity, smallholder food production, and health in the world’s least developed regions. This project will measure the effects of poverty along the water-food-health nexus among rural households in Kenya, specifically, how differential access to domestic and productive water supplies, along with food security, and HIV and TB disease burden relate to changes in poverty over time among adults living in rural Kenyan households. Goals include measuring interactions between household productive and domestic water use, nutritional outcomes, infectious diseases, and poverty; and identifying  local interventions and policy responses that are likely to have positive spillover effects in any of these domains.

CISAC Conference Room

473 Via Ortega, Y2E2, Room 255
Stanford, CA 94305-4020

(650) 725-9170
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Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
jennadavis.jpg PhD

Jennifer (“Jenna”) Davis is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Higgins-Magid Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, both of Stanford University. She also heads the Stanford Program on Water, Health & Development. Professor Davis’ research and teaching is focused at the interface of engineered water supply and sanitation systems and their users, particularly in developing countries. She has conducted field research in more than 20 countries, including most recently Zambia, Bangladesh, and Uganda.

Higgins-Magid Faculty Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Jenna Davis Assistant professor, civil and environmental engineering; Higgins-Magid Fellow, Woods Institute Speaker

Encina Commons, Room 102,
615 Crothers Way,
Stanford, CA 94305-6019

(650) 723-0984 (650) 723-1919
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Professor, Medicine
Professor, Health Policy
Senior Fellow, by courtesy, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment
eran_bendavid MD, MS

My academic focus is on global health, health policy, infectious diseases, environmental changes, and population health. Our research primarily addresses how health policies and environmental changes affect health outcomes worldwide, with a special emphasis on population living in impoverished conditions.

Our recent publications in journals like Nature, Lancet, and JAMA Pediatrics include studies on the impact of tropical cyclones on population health and the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 infectivity in children. These works are part of my broader effort to understand the health consequences of environmental and policy changes.

Collaborating with trainees and leading academics in global health, our group's research interests also involve analyzing the relationship between health aid policies and their effects on child health and family planning in sub-Saharan Africa. My research typically aims to inform policy decisions and deepen the understanding of complex health dynamics.

Current projects focus on the health and social effects of pollution and natural hazards, as well as the extended implications of war on health, particularly among children and women.

Specific projects we have ongoing include:

  • What do global warming and demographic shifts imply for the population exposure to extreme heat and extreme cold events?

  • What are the implications of tropical cyclones (hurricanes) on delivery of basic health services such as vaccinations in low-income contexts?

  • What effect do malaria control programs have on child mortality?

  • What is the evidence that foreign aid for health is good diplomacy?

  • How can we compare health inequalities across countries? Is health in the U.S. uniquely unequal? 

     

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Eran Bendavid Assistant professor, Department of Medicine Speaker

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
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Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Roz_low_res_9_11_cropped.jpg PhD

Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).

She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security. 

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Rosamond L. Naylor Director, FSE; Professor, Environmental Earth System Science; Associate Professor of Economics, by courtesy and William Wrigley Senior Fellow; FSI and Woods Institute Senior Fellow Speaker

Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305-4020

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Research Associate
Lecturer
Pickering.png MS, PhD

Amy Pickering is a research associate and lecturer at Stanford University. She received a BS in biological engineering at Cornell University, a MS in environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in interdisciplinary environment and resources at Stanford University. Her current research interests include understanding the relationship between water access, food security, sanitation and infectious disease in rural communities in Kenya, Bangladesh, and Mali.

Amy J. Pickering Postdoctoral fellow Speaker
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We exploit a unique institutional feature in the state of Oaxaca,  Mexico,  where municipalities were allowed to choose between a form of autonomy called “usos y costumbres” or delegating decisions to “modern” forms of representative government. Using a geographic discontinuity approach to identify causal effects,  we find strong evidence that political autonomy enhances development outcomes for indigenous communities. To explore plausible mechanisms,  we collected a household survey in over 90 villages. In autonomous villages,  direct participatory democracy practices lead to a more egalitarian distribution of services with a less notable anti-poor bias.

CISAC Conference Room

Dept. of Political Science
Encina Hall, Room 436
Stanford University,
Stanford, CA

(650) 724-5949
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Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations
Professor of Political Science
beatriz_magaloni_2024.jpg MA, PhD

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Director, Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab
Co-director, Democracy Action Lab
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Beatriz Magaloni Associate Professor of Political Science, FSI Senior Fellow, Director of Program on Poverty and Governance Speaker
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It is critically important for cost-effective and efficacious products to be developed indigenously within India. The Stanford-India Biodesign (SIB) program is designed to bring to market novel medical devices for India’s medically underserved, including those living in poverty. The purpose of the study is to identify the barriers that exist in India to commercializing low-cost medical technologies. The current work developed by SIB will be used as case studies, along with a literature review and ecosystem assessment, to determine the key issues that prevent or slow device commercialization in this environment. By studying these issues, new strategies and risk mitigation techniques can be designed to help more of projects succeed. The results are expected to have a wider impact beyond the SIB program given the number of entrepreneurial medical technology opportunities that are just beginning to be developed in India.

Philippines Conference Room

Paul Yock Stanford Health Policy Associate, Martha Meier Weiland Professor in the School of Medicine and Professor of Bioengineering and, by courtesy, of Mechanical Engineering and at the GSB Speaker
Anurag Mairal Director, Global Exchange Programs Speaker
Seminars
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This study seeks to understand whether developing an innovative curriculum kit that will supplement health instruction for 3rd to 6th grade students and teachers in underdeveloped areas of rural China can also be delivered to parents in a set of pilot schools will: improve nutrition and the knowledge of teacher, students and parents about nutrition; reduce the level of anemia; and increase educational performance. The project will also study how to best deliver the message and keep parents accessing the information so they can act on it. The work will entail developing and examining the effectiveness (on the same outcome variables we investigate for the supplemental health class) of ways to use new technologies: mobile phones and postal mailings (for those without mobile phones) to follow up with parents and try to reinforce the message so they put it into action.

Walter P. Falcon Lounge

Encina Hall East, E404
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Faculty Co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
Helen F. Farnsworth Endowed Professorship
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
scott_rozelle_new_headshot.jpeg PhD

Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.

His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.

Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. His book, Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise, was published in 2020 by The University of Chicago Press. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. For the past 20 years, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the University of California's Agricultural Issues Center; and a member of Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Center on Food Security and the Environment.

In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards, including the Friendship Award in 2008, the highest award given to a non-Chinese by the Premier; and the National Science and Technology Collaboration Award in 2009 for scientific achievement in collaborative research.

Faculty affiliate at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
Faculty Affiliate at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center
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Scott Rozelle Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow, FSI; Affiliated Faculty, CDDRL; and Co-director, REAP Speaker
Dan Schwartz Professor, School of Education, Stanford University Speaker
Seminars
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