Dr. Shenggen Fan serves as a director general and trustee at International Food Policy Research Institute.

Previously, Dr. Fan served as director of the Development Strategy and Governance Division of IFPRI. Since joining IFPRI in 1995, Dr. Fan served as a senior research fellow and led IFPRI’s program on public investment.

Prior to IFPRI, he held positions at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) in the Netherlands, and the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Fan’s major research includes pro-poor development strategy; pro-poor investment; and rural-urban linkages in developing countries, focusing mainly on Asia, Africa, and Middle East.

He currently directs a research division that works on governance, development strategy, public investment, and rural-urban linkages; and country strategy support in China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, and other countries. He has served in editorial board of various academic journals and is currently an executive committee member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists.

Dr. Fan is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Outstanding Alumni Award in Applied Economics and the Distinguished Leadership Award for Internationals, both from the University of Minnesota, and the Outstanding Young Scholar award from the National Science Foundation of China. He received his PhD in applied economics from the University of Minnesota, and his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Nanjing Agricultural University in China.