I learned this subject on a farm before I learned it in a library.

My first job advising farmers was explaining nutrient management to Kenyan smallholders who had heard the advice before and had good reasons for ignoring it. That is a useful place to start a career in food systems research, because it makes a particular kind of dishonesty impossible.

Across five years of field agronomy in Kenya, I designed and ran a factorial field trial testing two cover crops against three nitrogen rates across two soil types, supervised a team of five through establishment and data collection, and translated the results into guidance for a network of 1,000+ out-grower farmers. I also led agronomy for a vegetable seedling operation supplying 30,000+ farmers, which meant variety trials, stage-specific fertilisation programmes and a great deal of writing for people who would act on what I wrote by Thursday.

Before that I spent a year as an extension officer with Kenya's Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, working through crop data from more than a thousand smallholder farms. Between the degree and the ministry I taught agriculture and biology to secondary students, which remains the best training in explanation I have had.

I came to Edinburgh in 2025 as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar to do an MSc in Food Security, and finished the taught year with a distinction in every module. I completed the programme at the end of August 2026. My dissertation was a meta-analysis of maize and legume intercropping across sub-Saharan Africa, synthesising 69 studies and 640 comparisons of intercrops against sole crops using multilevel random-effects models in R. Two further pieces of my own research, one on nitrogen management and one on why proven sorghum technologies fail to close yield gaps, are currently preprinted and under peer review.

Alongside this I founded FarmHer Kenya, a voluntary network supporting young women smallholder farmers with training and links to markets, which has grown from fifteen members to around a hundred and fifty.

Writing and editing came earlier. As an undergraduate I ran the agriculture journalism club at my university, editing student publications and organising a forum that brought students together around farming.

What that background brings

Three things. I can read a trial and tell you whether its design supports its conclusion. I know what happens to a recommendation between the paper and the field, which is usually the most interesting part of the story. And I have spent years writing for readers who would use the document to make a decision, which is a different discipline from writing to be admired.