Chief Nutritionist
USAID
Patrick Webb, Ph.D.
Patrick Webb is Chief Nutritionist for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Patrick is the Agency’s advisor on nutrition-related programs and external events, as well as a key point of contact for the United States Government’s (USG) Global Food Security Strategy, the Global Malnutrition Prevention and Treatment Act, and he chairs the Senior Nutrition Champions Group of the USG’s Global Nutrition Coordination Plan.
To work at USAID, Patrick took a leave of absence from his role as the Alexander MacFarlane Professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University. At Tufts, he pursued policy-relevant research on food security policy and practice, agricultural development, humanitarian emergencies, and climate change, and food systems transformation. His work has been published in over 200 peer-reviewed papers.
Beyond Tufts, Patrick served for a decade as the senior Technical Adviser to the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition; he was re-appointed in 2022 for a second term on the Steering Committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) of the Committee on World Food Security; and he continues to serve in his personal capacity on the Eat-Lancet 2.0 Commission, as well as on the Food Systems Countdown Initiative (FSCI). Earlier in his career, he was a member of the Science Council overseeing the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research (the CGIAR), and he lived in Africa (Ethiopia, Niger, and The Gambia) while working for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).