OUR FELLOWS
Virginia Wangechi Wang’ondu hails from Nyeri, a town at the foot of Mount Kenya. It is an area of rich agricultural land, far removed—both physically and culturally—from the marine systems and mangrove forests that make up the focus of her research today.
I liked biology, chemistry, and physics in secondary school and excelled in those subjects,” says Wang’ondu. She opted to pursue a BSc in Botany and Zoology at the University of Nairobi, where she was introduced to courses in Microbiology and Hydrobiology. “We learned about mangrove ecosystems, but we didn’t have the opportunity to do field work on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast, so we just had to imagine what they looked like,” she recalls.
Field of Research
Analysis of competitiveness, value chains, effects of trade policies, and gender dimensions of horticultural crops among smallholder farmers, particularly women.