Valerie Stull joined McKnight as senior program officer with the Global Collaboration for Resilient Food Systems in May 2026. In this role, Valerie helps guide the Foundation’s work to transform global food systems. She oversees and develops grant portfolios that support efforts to build power through transformative partnerships, aligning McKnight’s work to cultivate resilient food systems with our climate and equity goals.
Valerie’s career has centered on the intersection of climate change, agriculture, and planetary health. Prior to joining McKnight, she served as a faculty associate and research scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she led diverse scholarship on soil health, food security and sovereignty, climate change and human health, gender, farmer well-being, and alternative proteins. Her mixed-methods research and programmatic work have spanned Southern and Eastern Africa, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, with support from the USDA, USAID, and a Fulbright award. She has experience with qualitative social science, farmer field experiments, laboratory methods, clinical trials, and modeling.
Valerie is dedicated to advancing agroecology and approaches that optimize circular economies, including innovative research on utilizing insects to recycle organic waste and enhance global nutrition. In 2014, she co-founded a collaborative international research initiative—now a small solutions-oriented nonprofit—that supports rural women farmers in Zambia and Rwanda to build agricultural resilience and improve livelihoods.
Valerie has a PhD from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and holds a Master of Public Health from Kansas State University. She has been recognized with a national Agriculture Innovation Prize for her work in sustainable food systems and continues to advocate for science-driven, community-centered solutions to complex global environmental health challenges.
Outside of the office, Valerie enjoys hiking in the Colorado Rockies, dabbling in poetry, sipping warm beverages, and family dance parties in the kitchen. An avid supporter of the circular economy at home, she also farms insects to feed her backyard chickens.
