In honor of World Food Day this year, the World Food Center has invited Catherine Bertini, the 2003 World Food Prize laureate, to speak on her role as the executive director of the United Nation’s World Food Programme for more than a decade, as part of a long career addressing critical food and nutritional issues among the world’s poorest.

According to the World Food Prize, Bertini’s efforts to streamline the World Food Programme’s operations, transparency and responsiveness was “deemed a ‘logistics miracle’ that brought food to millions in the drought-ravaged Horn of Africa, in Central America following Hurricane Mitch’s devastation, in the refugee camps and conflict zones of Kosovo and East Timor, and in dozens of other crises.”

Catherine Bertini is currently a professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.