I currently serve as Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University. After earning a B.S. in Food Technology from Texas Tech University in 1997, I received a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University in 2000. My first job out of graduate school was as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University, where I stayed for three years before moving to Purdue University as an Associate Professor. In 2005, I accepted my current position at Oklahoma State. In 2011, my family and I moved to Paris while I served as a visiting researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research and worked on a research fellowship awarded by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
My research primarily focuses on predicting and understanding consumer behavior as it relates to food. Since 2000, I’ve published more than 125 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals on a wide assortment of topics ranging from the economics of animal welfare to consumer preferences for genetically modified food to the impacts of new technologies and policies on livestock and meat markets to analyzing the merits of new survey and experimental approaches eliciting consumer preferences. I’ve been listed as one of the most prolific and cited food and agricultural economists of the past decade in a variety of outlets including here, here, here, and here, won numerous research awards, given lectures at over 30 universities in the US and abroad, and published editorials in outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com,Foxnews.com, and the Huffington Post. I’ve served on the editorial councils of seven academic journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. I’ve also been elected to and served on the executive committees of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics associations, including most recently the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
In 2007, I co-authored a book on a consumer research method with Jason Shogren published by Cambridge University Press and co-authored an undergraduate textbook on agricultural marketing and price analysis with Bailey Norwood published by Prentice-Hall. In 2011, I released a book co-authored with Norwood on the economics of farm animal welfare published by Oxford University Press and also co-edited the Oxford Handbook on the Economics of Food Consumption and Policy. My most recent book, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate, is slated for release by Crown Forum in April 2013.
I currently live in Stillwater, Oklahoma with my wife and two sons.
