Navin Ramankutty

Navin Ramankutty (1970) is an agricultural geographer.^[1] As of 2015 he is a professor of Global Food Security and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia^[2][3] Ramankutty studies changes in land use and agricultural practices, and the effect on global food production.^[4]

Early life and education

Ramankutty earned a B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at the PSG College of Technology in India in 1991. He received a Master of Science in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois in 1994, with the thesis An Empirical Estimate of Climate sensitivity. He then earned a Ph.D. in land resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000.

Career

After graduation Ramankutty worked as an assistant research scientist on a project at the Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, University of Wisconsin-Madison, on the development of the first worldwide land use maps.^[5] Information from these studies was used in the National Geographic Atlas of the World, 8th edition.^[6]

In 2006 he became an assistant professor in the McGill University geography department,^[7][8] and in 2014 moved to the University of British Columbia as a professor of global food security and sustainability.

Publications

Ramankutty has published more than 100 articles on various topics about land use and food security.^[9]