Biofuels, Bioenergy and Food Security

Deepayan Debnath serves as senior research scientist at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where his role is to conduct problem-oriented policy-relevant research in the broader field of bioenergy and biofuels and their implications for land use change, water and water quality, and greenhouse gas emissions. He has served as a senior research associate with Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he developed models of agricultural and biofuel markets. He has worked at Organization for Economic Cooperation Development, Paris, France and at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University. Dr. Debnath has published extensively in high impact journals including Applied Energy, Energy, and Biomass & Bioenergy. He has also written an op-ed in The Economics Times, the world's second most widely read business newspaper. He received Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Oklahoma State University with Leonard F. Miller Distinguished Graduate and Endowed International Agricultural Economics Fellowships. Suresh Chandra Babu is a senior fellow and a program leader at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, D.C and extraordinary professor of agricultural economics at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Before joining IFPRI as a research fellow in 1992, Dr. Babu was a research economist at Cornell University. He has published 20 books and monographs and more than 100 peer-reviewed journal papers on food and agricultural policies in developing countries. He has conducted research on food and agricultural policy in developing countries for the past 30 years. He has held visiting or honorary professorships at American University, Washington, D.C.; Indira Gandhi National Open University, India; University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa; and Zhejiang University, China. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several leading academic journals including, Food Security, Agricultural Economics Research Review, African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Journal of Sustainable Development, and Food and Nutrition Bulletin. Dr. Babu received his Ph.D. and M.S. in economics from Iowa State University, where he was awarded the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award for his services to global development.