Principal Scientist

**Principal Scientist I - Nutrition and Nutri-sensitive Food Systems for the Drylands**

ICRISAT is a non-profit, non-political organization that conducts agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners throughout the world. Covering 6.5 million square kilometers of land in 55 countries, the semi
- arid or dryland tropics has over 2 billion people and 644 million of these are the poorest of the poor. ICRISAT and its partners help empower these disadvantaged populations to overcome poverty, hunger and a degraded environment through better agricultural production systems.

**Position Objective**:
Provide strategic direction and steer the Nutrition and Nutri-sensitive Food Systems strategy of ICRISAT towards promoting dietary diversity, sustainable livelihood opportunities leading to food & nutritional security in the drylands. Strengthen and promote Inclusive Market Oriented Development (IMOD) model and Smart Food initiative of ICRISAT, ensuring inclusiveness of smallholder farming communities into the nutri-sensitive value chains, through local value chain innovations involving the dryland crops through: understanding of their market potential, nutritional and functional traits, development and promotion of value addition and related technologies for mainstreaming the dryland crops, establishing sustainable agro-food processing enterprises (involving rural/tribal women and youth), primary and secondary level. Establish local nutri-sensitive and market oriented, enabling ecosystems to create sustainable demand pull for the dryland crops. Promote and create awareness on food quality, traceability, food safety and food safety management systems across the food value chain from farm to fork, leveraging strategic partnerships with key stakeholders, involving both the public and private sector.

**Responsibilities**:

- Understanding different crop value chains and deciphering the key drivers and interventions to promote Agri-Nutri connect in the Drylands
- Develop strategic partnerships for Capacity Building of rural communities based on assessment and strengthening of institutional abilities, needs, risks, and benefits, leading to formulation of local strategies that can incentivize ecosystem-based nutri-sensitive food systems
- Integrate into interdisciplinary teams, both internal and external, and contribute to the relevant One CGIAR initiatives in the areas of nutrition, one health, post-harvest management, food technology, food safety, etc.
- Establish a roadmap for circular approach linking sustainable food production to nutrition and One Health through effective resource mapping/management (mapping current and historical foods grown and consumed in each local areas, employing stakeholder information from Capacity Building for rural communities to identify local perspectives, challenges, needs, and intervention opportunities), and developing a localized loop for food production to consumption that incorporates market linkages with residual feedstock/side-streams, involving diverse climate resilient crops and shorter value chains
- Identify opportunities and develop collaborative research projects to be undertaken to promote sustainable nutri-sensitive food systems, leveraging technologies available with ICRISAT and partners across the globe
- Establish strategic partnerships with national and international research institutions, government organizations, public private sector companies and entrepreneurs
- Provide coaching and technical backstopping to key stakeholders, partners and entrepreneurs to ensure that nutri-sensitive product ideas and technologies are successfully developed in a collaborative manner and further scaled-up and commercialized, ensuring inclusiveness and integration of the smallholder farming communities into the value chains
- Manage, integrate and provide technical backstopping to the food product development and food testing laboratories and pilot plants of ICRISAT and its partners in order to carry out research and development activities, provide services/training (especially to entrepreneurs), in the areas of food technology for value addition, food safety, post-harvest management etc., with focus on dryland crops
- Provide strategic inputs to design and develop training programs towards capacity building of R&D teams for product development and related research operations towards supporting the agri-food incubation initiatives of ICRISAT, especially at the local level in Asia and Africa
- Provide strategic inputs towards conceptualizing and implementing primary and secondary-community owned processing units, adhering to relevant food safety guidelines/regulations and management systems
- Engage with ICRISATs Research programs and relevant clusters to develop joint research activities towards promoting agri-nutri connect, by ensuring integration of research and development aspects, to promote consumer and market preferred traits i