Mario Herrero

Mario Herrero is a professor of sustainable food systems and global change in the Department of Global Development, a Cornell Atkinson Scholar, and a Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. He is also an Associate Fellow of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He has over 25 years of research and development experience working on increasing the sustainability of food systems for the benefit of people and ecosystems. He works in the areas of food systems futures, climate mitigation and adaptation, livestock systems, healthy and sustainable diets, and sustainability metrics. 

Professor Herrero is a regular contributor to important global initiatives at the heart of the sustainability of global food systems, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Food Systems Summit, the Lancet Commission on Obesity and the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. He has worked extensively in Africa, Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region, and in global analyses. Before joining Cornell, he was Chief Scientist of Sustainability, for CSIRO Agriculture and Food, Australia’s National Science Agency. He also spent 12 years in the CGIAR at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya in a range of capacities.

Mario has published more than 200 peer reviewed publications in his areas of expertise. He is a Highly Cited Researcher according to the Web of Science and is in the top 10 of the Reuters Hot list of the world’s 1000 most influential climate change researchers. In 2019, he was awarded a Fellowship to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his contributions to the sustainability of food systems. He is an editor of the Global Food Security journal and is also on numerous editorial boards. He obtained his postgraduate degrees from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.