Director for sustainable development
United States Department of Agriculture
Dr. Elise H. Golan is the director for sustainable development for the United States Department of Agriculture. In this role, she provides leadership in planning, coordinating, and analyzing the department's various policies, programs and activities that impact and relate to sustainable agricultural, natural resource, and community development, including food security. Prior to this position, Golan served as the associate director of the food economics division at the Economic Research Service, USDA.
Before joining the USDA, Golan did consulting work for, among others, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization and the California Department of Finance. She served as a senior staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1998-99.
Golan’s research spans a wide range of sustainability issues, including: land tenure and sustainable land management in the Sahel and West Africa; regional and U.S. food-system modeling; food labeling and market development; food access, affordability, and security; and distributional consequences of food policy
She received her PhD in agricultural economics from the University of California at Berkeley and completed a post-doctorate fellowship focusing on environmental economics at the University of Haifa, Israel.