Distinguished Fellow, Global Food and Agriculture, Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Catherine Bertini is a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She has a distinguished career improving the efficiency and operations of organizations serving poor and hungry people in the United States and around the world. She has highlighted and supported the roles of women and girls in influencing change.
Bertini is now the chair of the board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). As a United Nations Under Secretary General, she initiated efforts to reform the global system for security of staff and for the recognition of all staff marriages. She interacted with all UN agencies and their leadership through a variety of UN bodies in humanitarian, development, nutrition, security and management roles, and led UN humanitarian missions to the Horn of Africa and to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel.
She is a professor emeritus at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. She served as a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation early in its new agricultural development program, on the jury for the Hilton Foundation Humanitarian Prize, and as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow. She has been honored by twelve universities in four countries with honorary degrees and by the Republics of Italy and Ireland. She was named the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate for her transformational leadership at the World Food Programme, which she led for ten years, and for the positive impact she had on the lives of women. With her World Food Prize, she created the Catherine Bertini Trust Fund for Girls’ Education. She has received multiple awards for her work to improve the lives of children, for her management of internal reform processes, and for her advocacy for women and girls. She was appointed to senior positions by three UN Secretaries-General and five US presidents.
She has been named a Champion of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. She is a patron of Gender in Agricultural Partnership (GAP), a senior non-resident advisor to the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), and a member of the Leadership Council of Compact 2025 of the International Food Policy Research Institute and of the ACIES End Hunger Sustainably Program advisory board. She was graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the State University of New York, in Albany. Catherine Bertini is also a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.