With your partnership, WashU faculty are advancing ideas that reach across disciplines and borders.
From hunger and malnutrition to climate-driven crop loss, the world is facing unprecedented challenges that demand bold thinking and collaborative solutions. At WashU, faculty are rising to meet these challenges head-on.
The university’s new Food and Agriculture Research Mission (FARM) is the latest example of how WashU is investing in high-impact faculty research with global reach. Launched with generous support from the Lauren and Lee Fixel Family Foundation, FARM is housed within the university’s newly established School of Public Health — a placement that reflects the growing understanding that food systems and human health are deeply interconnected.
“We’re confronting real-time crises,” said Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, the inaugural Margaret C. Ryan Dean and Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health. “Food security and nutrition are foundational to public health, affecting everything from childhood development to chronic disease prevention.”
FARM is designed to accelerate innovation and strengthen partnerships with industry, government, and farmers. This model encourages collaborative research with real-world applications, ensuring faculty discoveries can move beyond the lab to the communities they aim to serve.
Together, with our partners in St. Louis and beyond, we will transform how we grow food, nourish communities and sustain the environment — because the health of regional, national, and global populations depends on it
Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of WashU
Lora Iannotti, a leading expert on maternal and child nutrition, and Feng Jiao, a chemical engineer developing sustainable food production methods, are among the inaugural Lauren and Lee Fixel Distinguished Professors helping shape the FARM initiative.
Donor support is helping make this work possible — not only through strategic investments such as endowed professorships, but also through new programs designed to fuel faculty innovation. The FARM Catalyst Award, Incubator Fund, and Transformative Ideas Competition are philanthropic funding models that provide WashU researchers with resources to thrive.
“The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated,” WashU Chancellor Andrew D. Martin said. “Hunger, malnutrition, and environmental degradation are not distant threats — they are present crises demanding immediate, coordinated action.
“We have the opportunity to interrupt these consequences by applying innovative solutions to seemingly intractable problems,” he added. “Together, with our partners in St. Louis and beyond, we will transform how we grow food, nourish communities and sustain the environment — because the health of regional, national, and global populations depends on it.”