Hope C. Michelson

Dr. Hope Michelson is a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on agricultural development, smallholder farmers, natural resource management, and food security in low-income countries, with an emphasis on how agricultural technologies, markets, and information shape household welfare and poverty dynamics. Her work combines field experiments, household and firm panel data, and measures of soil and agricultural input quality, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. 

She currently chairs the AIM for Scale Technical Panel on Soil Health, is an Associate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and an affiliate of J-PAL and serves as Co-Editor of Food Policy. Her research has been published in leading journals including Nature Food, the Journal of Development Economics, Food Policy, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and Economic Development and Cultural Change.