Lena Heron is a Senior Rural Development Advisor in USAID’s Bureau for Food Security. She has been with USAID since 2000, and has conducted numerous agricultural sector assessments and designed projects to promote agricultural value chain development in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa. She is the USAID project manager for the Assets and Market Access Collaborative Research Support Program, a virtual research facility which aims to improve the economic resiliency of the rural poor through policy-relevant research on access to and the function of markets.  Ms. Heron’s interests include rural and agricultural finance, risk and insurance, and value chain development.  As part of the Bureau of Food Security, Ms. Heron is involved with the implementation of the US Government’s Global Food Security Initiative, also known as Feed the Future.  She has been particularly active in development of programming approaches to poverty reduction, sustainable livelihoods and risk management under Feed the Future.

Ruth Hill is a Research Fellow in the Markets Trade and Institutions division of IFPRI. She joined IFPRI in 2007 as a post-doctoral fellow in the Director General’s Office. Ruth has 8 years experience conducting research on rural markets in East Africa and India, more recently focusing on formal and informal markets for insurance. She designed and implemented a weather securities pilot conducted in 2009, and this season she is working with Nyala Insurance S.C., Ethiopia and the University of Oxford to test market demand for security-style insurance products through groups. She also works with firms in Tanzania and farmers groups in Uganda to identify and implement interventions that improve the functioning of output markets. Prior to joining IFPRI Ruth worked at the World Bank. She received a PhD in economics from the University of Oxford in 2005.

Kimberly Pfeifer is the Head of Research at Oxfam America, where she oversees the production of research and trends analysis for policy, advocacy and campaign purposes. She has written a number of Oxfam International Policy Briefing Papers focused on trade and agricultural issues, and has managed a number of research projects, including one on the socio-economic impacts of the adoption of Bt cotton for resource-poor farmers. Prior to joining Oxfam, Kimberly worked for the AFL-CIO as a researcher with the Center for Strategic Research and then as the campaign coordinator for the No More Business as Usual campaign. She has also worked for the Aga Khan Foundation with their NGO Resource Center in Zanzibar, Tanzania. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Florida in Political Science and African Studies. She has a number of publications and papers critiquing models of development, and on land and natural resource politics.