Dr. Norman Uphoff, professor emeritus in the Department of Government and a former director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development (CIIFAD) and the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs (CIPA), joined the Cornell faculty in 1970 after completing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as chair of Cornell’s interdisciplinary Rural Development Committee between 1970 and 1990, when he was appointed first director of CIIFAD and also a professor of International Agriculture. His work has focused on local institutions and participatory development, and since 2000 on agroecology and particularly on the system of rice intensification (SRI) developed in Madagascar.

His publications include two books with Warren Ilchman, The Political Economy of Change (1969) and The Political Economy of Development (1972); also Local Organizations: Intermediaries in Rural Development (1982), Local Institutional Development (1986); Learning from Gal Oya (1992); Puzzles of Productivity in Public Organizations (1994); and Reasons for Hope: Instructive Experiences in Rural Development (1997) and Reasons for Success: Learning from Instructive Experiences in Rural Development (1998). His most recent book (2006) is an edited volume on Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems, and his most recent articles, co-authored, were published last month in Plant and Soil and Advances in Agronomy. He has served on USAID’s Research Advisory Committee, and he has been a consultant for the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations, the CGIAR, and other agencies. In March 2015, he received the first international Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security for his work with SRI.