Aishwarya Venkat , Ph.D., is a geospatial analyst and food systems researcher with interdisciplinary expertise in the climate-food-health nexus. She is particularly interested in climate resilience and food security in coupled human and natural systems. At Project Drawdown her work focuses on climate solutions related to land use change and sustainable diets.
Aishwarya recently earned her doctorate from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University with a dissertation on extreme weather event impacts on food systems. Her prior work focused on contextualizing seasonal trends in acute malnutrition in arid and semi-arid regions, as well as improving global monitoring of diet costs and affordability through the Cost of Healthy Diet. She holds a master’s degree in environmental and water resources engineering from Tufts and a bachelor's degree in biosystems engineering from Virginia Tech.
In her free time, Aishwarya enjoys gardening, birdwatching, and hiking and kayaking around the Pacific Northwest.