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Biography
Dr. Udita Sanga is an Assistant Professor of Climate, Food Systems, and Sustainability at the Friedman School. She is an interdisciplinary systems scientist whose research focuses on advancing climate-resilient transformations of food and agricultural systems. Over the past 15+ years, her work has spanned regions including West Africa and South Asia, addressing challenges such as agricultural sustainability, climate resilience, poverty traps, innovation systems, food security, and sustainable resource management. She examines how social, political, technological, and environmental changes interact with the beliefs, motivations, and decision-making of actors who shape food and agricultural systems. Her work emphasizes collaborative model co-creation with stakeholders, using participatory approaches such as systems mapping and scenario planning alongside computational simulations, including agent-based and system dynamics modeling, to identify context-specific pathways toward agricultural sustainability, resilience and transformation.
Dr. Sanga currently leads an action-oriented research initiative in Jharkhand, India, focused on revitalizing intergenerational knowledge for sustainable food futures. The project bridges Indigenous knowledge with systems science and anthropological perspectives, exploring foodways—how food is grown, harvested, prepared, and shared—as both material and culturally meaningful practices shaped by ecological processes, social relations, cultural values, and power dynamics. By integrating multiple ways of knowing, her research highlights how diverse knowledge systems can guide inclusive, adaptive, and contextually grounded approaches to food and agricultural transformation.
