Ertharin Cousin is a distinguished fellow of global agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and she serves as the Stanford University Spogli Institute for the Study of International Relations Payne Distinguished Lecturer and Visiting Fellow. She previously served as executive director of the World Food Programme from 2012 until 2017. In this role, Cousin led the world’s largest humanitarian organization with 14,000 staff serving 80 million vulnerable people across 75 countries.

From 2009-2012, Cousin served as the U.S. ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome, where she acted as the U.S. representative for all food, agriculture, and nutrition related issues.

Prior to her global hunger work, Cousin helped lead the U.S. domestic fight to end hunger while serving as executive vice president and chief operating officer of America’s Second Harvest (now Feeding America) and as senior vice president for Albertson’s Foods.

A Chicago native, Cousin is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Georgia Law School, and the University of Chicago Executive Management Finance for Non-Financial Executives program. Cousin has received honorary doctorate degrees from universities around the globe. She has been listed numerous times on the Forbes “100 Most Powerful Women” list, as the Fortune “Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink,” on Time’s “100 Most Influential People” list, and as one of the “500 Most Powerful People on the Planet” by Foreign Policy magazine.