Ellen Bess McCullough
| Degree | Ph.D, Applied Economics and Management |
| Areas of Interest | Economics of Development and Public Policy Analysis |
| Email Address | ebm68@cornell.edu |
| Personal Website | www.ellenmccullough.com |
Ellen McCullough is a PhD student in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell. Her research focuses on structural transformation in African economies. She is working to understand the links between agricultural technology, household labor allocation, agricultural exits, and economic welfare using new cross-sectional and longitudinal datasets in six African countries. In particular, she is exploring the implications of intra-and inter-household as well as intra- and inter-sector labor productivity differentials for agricultural transformation prospects and pathways. Ellen's research also focuses on market participation in developing countries and the distributional impacts of food price changes. Ellen is participating in the food systems and poverty reduction IGERT based at Cornell University. She joined the Dyson School in fall 2011.
Ellen received her BS in Earth Systems at Stanford University in 2003, and an MS in 2004 from the same program. Most recently, she worked as an Associate Program Officer in the Agricultural Development program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. There, she developed a portfolio of grants focused primarily on generating better household level survey data to guide policies and investments. Before joining the foundation, she worked in the Agricultural Development Economics division of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Italy. There, she led a cross-country research project on organizational changes in food systems and the impacts on smallholder farmers. She edited a book synthesizing the results of this research (The Transformation of Agri-Food Systems: Globalization, Supply Chains and Smallholder Farmers).
In her free time, Ellen enjoys fly fishing, trail running, backpacking, live country music, and cow-calf ranch operations.
