Dr. Krista Isaacs
Dr. Krista Isaacs
My research interests combine crop ecology, human nutrition, gender, and participatory research in order to co-create sustainable agricultural systems with smallholder farmers. Smallholder farmers approach their livelihood strategies from a holistic and complex perspective and in order to co-create resilient systems – we must communicate and collaborate across knowledge systems. From a research perspective, this requires adaptive trans-disciplinary approaches and I’m interested in developing such adaptive approaches with communities. In practice, I have worked in northern Rwanda with farmer associations to identify ideal plant characteristics for beans in bean-maize intercropping systems, assessed changes in crop diversity due to government policy shifts, and interviewed farmers to understand how this impacted their households. Currently, I work with ICRISAT in Mali researching farmer trait preferences for sorghum varieties, participatory plant breeding processes, and decentralized seed systems.
