Awudu Abdulai, chair of food economics at the University of Kiel, Germany, was FSE's Cargill visiting scholar from October 2010 - March 2011. While at Stanford he pursued three research themes. The first looked at how farmers risk preferences influence their decisions to adopt water conservation technologies and how that impacts farm productivity. The second examined how social capital, property rights and tenure duration affect farmers' investment decisions on sustainable management practices. The third involved an analysis of the welfare impacts of cultivating export crops in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Kiel, Professor Abdulai taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH) and also held visiting positions at the Departments of Economics at Yale University and Iowa State University, as well as the International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC. Abdulai is originally from Ghana and his fields of interests span development economics, consumer economics and industrial organization.