My name is Damilola Tominsin Aladesuru. People call me Dami, feel free to do so. I am from a small town in southwest Nigeria. It’s not Lagos, but rather up north of Lagos.

My journey as a researcher began many years ago during my undergraduate studies. One day, my mom prepared one of my favourite sauces, Gbegiri, a traditional Yoruba bean stew, and it tasted so good that I felt inspired to share the recipe with the world through a blog. I already had a blog at the time, but this sparked the idea of writing about food. What began as a simple desire to share a family recipe soon led me to experiment with different dishes and write about exotic fruits and vegetables throughout the rest of my undergraduate studies in Agricultural Science. Writing about these fruits/ vegetables often required research, which suited me perfectly, as I’ve always been the curious type, asking my parents the most random questions and passionately seeking answers.

What began as a food blog gradually transformed into a larger project exploring strategies to increase vegetable consumption in my community, and into broader curiosity about the functioning of food systems, particularly the stages before food gets to the consumer.

I find it important to think about the people in the system just as much as we work on improving the process of the system. That is, finding answers to questions such as: How can we optimise the value chain of fruits produced by rural communities to reduce wastage? and also How can we help a rural farmer, who was told that moringa is the next big crop, to get some revenue for her now ready-to-harvest moringa plants?

My master’s studies in Agricultural Economics provided me with a broad understanding of agriculture and food systems, along with research methods and modelling tools that can be applied to address various agricultural production questions. Given the diversity of questions across contexts, I am particularly drawn to deepening my knowledge of both traditional and novel econometric methods, and I am increasingly working with tools such as geospatial analysis and machine learning to better understand patterns and predict outcomes in agricultural and food systems research.

Additionally, I subscribe to feminist epistemology and see value in exploring multiple standpoints, not only to get the full picture, but also so that people of different standpoints can identify with the conclusions and solutions we researchers propose. This means that in my agricultural research, I am curious about understanding the European standpoints as well as African or Indian perspectives. I also want to know how men’s experiences compare to women’s. As such, alongside methodologically fascinating projects, I am especially excited to work on gender- and regionally-disaggregated research, and studies that intentionally explore multiple perspectives.