Christophe Béné

Chris Béné is Principal Scientist and Senior Policy Advisor working with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT headquartered in Cali, Colombia. He is currently affiliated to the CGIAR Systems Transformation Science Group and seconded to the Wageningen Economic Research Group (WEcR) at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

He has 20+ years of experience conducting inter-disciplinary research and advisory work in different parts of the world (Africa, Asia, Pacific), focusing on food security, and poverty in low and middle-income countries. In his career, he worked on a wide range of topics, including natural resource management, policy analysis, science-policy interface, resilience (measurement), and more recently food system (sustainability). In 2022 and 2023, he was listed in the top 1 percent of the world’s most cited scientists by Clarivate/Web of Science in the domain of cross-field research.

Chris holds a PhD in Environment and Life Sciences from the University of Paris 6 (France), a post-graduate Diploma in Development Economics from the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia (UK), and a Master in Environmental Sciences from the University of Marseille (France). Before joining CIAT in 2015, he worked for different research organizations including the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in UK, the WorldFish Center (in Egypt and in Malaysia), and the Economic Department of the University of Portsmouth (UK).