The ANH Academy — Agriculture, Nutrition and Health

For the past decade it’s been my pleasure to lead Tufts University’s role in creating the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health Science-Policy Platform, a global organization serving over 10,000 researchers and policy analysts working across Africa, Asia and worldwide.  Membership is free, and you are welcome to join us here. 

The ANH Science-Policy Platform is funded through 2029 by the UK government and the Gates Foundation (INV-042668), extending the ANH Academy built by the IMMANA project (also funded by the UK and the Gates Foundation, as INV-002962 for 2020-2024, and previously as OPP1211308 for 2015- 2020).  IMMANA stands for Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions.  Over its decade of initial activity from 2015 to 2024, the IMMANA project helped transform measurement of food environments as described here.  Most recently in 2024-25, our work at Tufts included inflential research from Postdoctoral Researcher Elena Martinez with part-time assistance from Hayley Fryling.  

For 2025-2029, Tufts activities for IMMANA are managed by Alex Knueppel, with project coordinator Shaelin Cullen and impact analyst Nola Jenkins, spanning three workstreams:

First, we lead the ANH Science-Policy Fellowships program, offering full-time stipends to support a year of  transformational research and policy analysis. The current call for applications is detailed here: https://www.anh-academy.org/science-policy-fellowships.  Prior to this, we had eight rounds supporting a total of 44 fellows whose work is described on their profile pages. 

Second, we designed and maintain the platform’s SCANR resources website.  This Support Centre for Agriculture-Nutrition Research serves ANH Academy members with research guidance and teaching resources, including blog posts and use cases to help researchers cross into new fields and disciplines, finding the data products and software tools needed to address cross-cutting aspects of agriculture, nutrition and health. You can see it all online, or email us at scanr@tufts.edu. 

Third, we developed and manage the ANH Academy Research Communities, providing monthly events for ANH Academy members to share methods and results in specific areas of common interest. The first series of events begun in 2024 is our Research Community on Food Access and Demand for Healthy Diets,  to be joined in October 2025 by a new Research Community on Food Supply, Loss and Waste. Each research community’s purpose is to facilitate peer-to-peer discussion about software tools, data sources and other aspects of the research process, in monthly roundtable conversations and  drop-in office hours.  You can sign up online, or email us at researchcommunities@tufts.edu.