Dr. Karl Rich

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Dr. Karl M. Rich is Director of the Master of International Agriculture Program (MIAP) in the Ferguson College of Agriculture and a Professor of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University. While trained as an agricultural economist, Dr. Rich’s research has cut across disciplinary boundaries, integrating agricultural and livestock policy analysis, global agribusiness issues, animal and aquatic health, and methods development. He has successfully worked with veterinarians, epidemiologists, animal scientists, and crop experts on a variety of applied research topics around the world, providing contextual guidance on socio-economic drivers of behavior and uptake and empirical evidence of benefits and tradeoffs across economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Most recently, he has pioneered the use of specialized participatory tools to develop systems models and impact assessments with stakeholders to help them co-conceptualize problems and co-create solutions. These tools have been applied in the context of urban agriculture planning in New Zealand; socio-economic drivers of animal disease in Zambia, Timor-Leste, Thailand, Vietnam, and Senegal; nutritionally-sensitive marketing channels for horticulture in South Asia; livestock value chain development in Nicaragua, Myanmar, and Ghana; and climate-smart agriculture in Senegal.

 

Dr. Rich joined OSU in July 2021 after 16 years of working overseas. Dr. Rich has traveled to 87 countries, with applied research and/or teaching experience in over 30 of these countries and long-term residence in nine. He was most recently at the International Livestock Research Institute’s (ILRI) West Africa Regional Office in Dakar, Senegal. At ILRI, Dr. Rich led a multidisciplinary team conducting applied research that informed livestock sector strategy and investment options in the developing world. He led a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project to develop improved tools for livestock sector planning, as well as an impact assessment of the 2019 African Swine Fever outbreak in Vietnam and a project on livestock trade corridors in West Africa. He was also part of a multidisciplinary team that advised the Government of Uruguay on whether to stop vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease in 2019. Previous to his work at ILRI, Dr. Rich worked in the Master of International Rural Development program at Lincoln University in New Zealand; the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo; the Department of Economics at the American University of Cairo; the South Asia Office of the International Food Policy Research Institute in New Delhi, India; and the U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, D.C. He also has served as an advisor to the CGIAR Covid-19 Hub; a World Health Organization panel on neglected tropical diseases; and the Scottish Government’s Centre for Excellence on Animal Health (EPIC). In the past ten years, he has raised over $20 million in external grants in collaboration with multidisciplinary research teams. He has over 70 peer-reviewed articles in a variety of high-impact journals that span the areas of agricultural economics, agribusiness, systems modeling, veterinary science, and environmental management.

 

Dr. Rich holds graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) in agricultural economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelors (B.A.) degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently associate editor in the Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics section of Frontiers in Veterinary Science and the Planetary Health board of Advances in Global Health. He has successfully advised 11 M.S. and Ph.D. students during his career, and looks forward to mentoring the next generation of global leaders in MIAP.