Abid is working as a Senior Agronomist in Agriculture and Food Security Programme of BRAC. He has a Master of Science in Environmental Science from Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh, Bangladesh. His work is focused on managing agricultural research project on different crops and cropping pattern, planning and executing social research on agricultural value chain addressing nutrition for the poor and pursuing climate adaptive research activities.

For LANSA

Meera Shekar is Global Lead for nutrition at World Bank. She led the repositioning of the nutrition agenda within World Bank and with partners resulting in the birth of the global Scaling-up Nutrition (SUN) movement. Meera has been one of the principals for the aid-architecture for the SUN, the G8 and G20 agenda-setting process for food security and nutrition. 

Meera has lived and worked across the globe and has her PhD in international nutrition, epidemiology and population studies from Cornell University. Among other publications, she has authored eTransform Africa: the Transformational use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa, 2012; Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development, 2006; and Scaling-up Nutrition –What will it cost? 2009. She has been a member of several advisory boards including the academic committee of the Public Health Foundation of India, WHO Nutrition Guidance Advisory group, Conference Advisory Committee for the First and second Global Conference on Bio-fortification, Cornell University DNS External Advisory Board, and Founding member of International Society for Implementation Science for Nutrition (ISISN).

FOR LANSA

Meera Shekar provides strategic guidance from an external perspective via LANSA’s Consortium Advisory Group.

Professor MS Swaminathan has been acclaimed by the TIME magazine as one of the twenty most influential Asians of the 20th century and one of only three from India. He has been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as “the Father of Economic Ecology” and by Javier Perez de Cuellar, Secretary General of the United Nations, as “a living legend who will go into the annals of history as a world scientist of rare distinction”. 

Using proceeds from the World Food Prize in 1988, Professor MS Swaminathan set up MSSRF, the lead organisation behind LANSA.

For LANSA

Professor Swaminathan provides strategic guidance from an external perspective via LANSA's Consortium Advisory Group.

Nigel Poole is a socio-economist who originally trained in agricultural sciences and agricultural extension. He works in the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy in SOAS, University of London, and is part of the team of the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health of the University’s London International Development Centre. He has experience in diverse countries in Latin America, the Mediterranean Basin, Sub-Saharan Africa and South and South-east Asia.

For LANSA

Nigel leads LANSA work in Afghanistan on agri-nutrition policy and stakeholder mapping, designing research on climate-agriculture-nutrition interactions, and assessing the nutrition impact of agricultural interventions. He also contributes to the work on agri-value chains for nutrition and health.