About

Lisa grew up in New York City, and first got interested in food and agriculture when she was 10 years old and there was a 25 mile Walkathon in her borough “to end hunger”. In her teens she learned about food preservation (canning, making jams and preserves) from her grandmothers and great aunts. In her 20s (during the 1970s) Lisa studied science in college and got interested in “the world food crisis” and upset that so many people were suffering from poverty and lack of resources. Lisa decided to study agriculture in grad school and became an avid gardener and world traveler. She holds two Master’s degrees (in vegetable crops and in international agricultural development) from the University of California at Davis. Her doctorate is in the subject of Agricultural Extension Education (from Ohio State), which is the informal teaching of adults/rural populations, and her specialization is reducing food losses and waste of fruits and vegetable crops. Since 1990 Lisa has worked as a private horticultural consultant, international trainer in postharvest technology and project director in more than 20 developing countries (mostly in Africa, India, Indonesia and the Middle East). Among the organizations Lisa has worked with are Africare, Care Int’l, WFLO, Winrock Int’l, USDA, USAID, the Gates Foundation, UN FAO, the World Bank and many US universities. In 2011, when Lisa had semi-retired, a few of her long-term colleagues and Lisa got together and launched a non-profit org in Oregon that focuses on training young hort professionals in developing countries to learn about food losses, identify postharvest problems and how to solve them in order to help small-scale farmers reduce wasted resources and increase their incomes.