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With research staff from more than 70 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Lilia Bliznashka

Lily Bliznashka is a Research Fellow in the Nutrition, Diets, and Health Unit. Her research focuses on assessing the effectiveness of multi-input nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions and the mechanisms through which they work to improve maternal and child health and nutrition globally. She has worked in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 480 employees working in over 70 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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The University of Georgia is dedicated to creating a dependable food supply and advancing economic growth. The College of Agricultural & Environmental Sciences (CAES) works to support Georgia’s food and fiber industry, as well as working around the world and nationwide through partnerships with international organizations. CAES is home to centers working with plant breeding and genomics, food quality, and more.

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Publications

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Preprint

Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences

2025Anderberg, Dan; Cassidy, Rachel; Dam, Anaya; Hidrobo, Melissa; Leight, Jessica; Morsink, Karlijn
Details

Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences

One in three women globally experiences intimate partner violence (IPV), yet little is known about how such trauma affects economic decision-making. We provide causal evidence that IPV influences women’s time preferences – a key parameter in models of savings, investment, and labor supply. We combine two empirical strategies using four distinct datasets. First, in two randomized recall experiments in Ethiopia, we randomly assigned women to recall specific acts of abuse before eliciting their intertemporal choices. Women with IPV experiences prompted to recall IPV display significantly greater impatience than otherwise similar women who are not prompted. Second, we exploit exogenous reductions in IPV generated by two randomized interventions – one involving cash transfers, the other psychotherapy – and use treatment assignment as an instrument for IPV exposure. Women who experience reduced IPV as a result of treatment exhibit more patient time preferences. Together, these results provide consistent, novel causal evidence that exposure to IPV induces individuals to discount the future more heavily. This evidence suggests a psychological channel through which violence can perpetuate economic disadvantage and constrain women’s ability to take actions – such as saving, investing, or exiting abusive relationships – that require planning over time.

Year published

2025

Authors

Anderberg, Dan; Cassidy, Rachel; Dam, Anaya; Hidrobo, Melissa; Leight, Jessica; Morsink, Karlijn

Citation

Anderberg, Dan; Cassidy, Rachel; Dam, Anaya; Hidrobo, Melissa; Leight, Jessica; and Morsink, Karlijn. 2025. Intimate partner violence and women’s economic preferences. Preprint available online July 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.10416

Country/Region

Ethiopia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Decision Making; Domestic Violence; Economics; Women; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.10416 Source record

Record type

Preprint

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Journal Article

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

2023
Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Li, Xianran
…more Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; Buell, Robin C.; DellaPenna, Dean; Yu, Jianming; Gore, Michael A.
Details

Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain

With an essential role in human health, tocochromanols are mostly obtained by consuming seed oils; however, the vitamin E content of the most abundant tocochromanols in maize (Zea mays L.) grain is low. Several large-effect genes with cis-acting variants affecting messenger RNA (mRNA) expression are mostly responsible for tocochromanol variation in maize grain, with other relevant associated quantitative trait loci (QTL) yet to be fully resolved. Leveraging existing genomic and transcriptomic information for maize inbreds could improve prediction when selecting for higher vitamin E content. Here, we first evaluated a multikernel genomic best linear unbiased prediction (MK-GBLUP) approach for modeling known QTL in the prediction of nine tocochromanol grain phenotypes (12–21 QTL per trait) within and between two panels of 1,462 and 242 maize inbred lines. On average, MK-GBLUP models improved predictive abilities by 7.0–13.6% when compared with GBLUP. In a second approach with a subset of 545 lines from the larger panel, the highest average improvement in predictive ability relative to GBLUP was achieved with a multi-trait GBLUP model (15.4%) that had a tocochromanol phenotype and transcript abundances in developing grain for a few large-effect candidate causal genes (1–3 genes per trait) as multiple response variables. Taken together, our study illustrates the enhancement of prediction models when informed by existing biological knowledge pertaining to QTL and candidate causal genes.

Year published

2023

Authors

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; Buell, Robin C.; DellaPenna, Dean; Yu, Jianming; Gore, Michael A.

Citation

Tanaka, Ryokei; Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Wood, Joshua C.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; et al. 2023. Leveraging prior biological knowledge improves prediction of tocochromanols in maize grain. Plant Genome 16(4): e20276. https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.20276

Keywords

Maize; Health; Vitamin E; Genetics; Antioxidants; Quantitative Trait Loci; Gene Expression; Transcriptomics

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1002/tpg2.20276 Source record

Record type

Journal Article

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Combining GWAS and TWAS to identify candidate causal genes for tocochromanol levels in maize grain

2022
Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tanaka, Ryokei; Wood, Joshua C.; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Diepenbrock, Christine H.
…more Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; Yu, Jianming; Buell, C. Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Gore, Michael A.
Details

Combining GWAS and TWAS to identify candidate causal genes for tocochromanol levels in maize grain

Tocochromanols (tocopherols and tocotrienols, collectively vitamin E) are lipid-soluble antioxidants important for both plant fitness and human health. The main dietary sources of vitamin E are seed oils that often accumulate high levels of tocopherol isoforms with lower vitamin E activity. The tocochromanol biosynthetic pathway is conserved across plant species but an integrated view of the genes and mechanisms underlying natural variation of tocochromanol levels in seed of most cereal crops remains limited. To address this issue, we utilized the high mapping resolution of the maize Ames panel of ∼1,500 inbred lines scored with 12.2 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms to generate metabolomic (mature grain tocochromanols) and transcriptomic (developing grain) data sets for genetic mapping. By combining results from genome- and transcriptome-wide association studies, we identified a total of 13 candidate causal gene loci, including 5 that had not been previously associated with maize grain tocochromanols: 4 biosynthetic genes (arodeH2 paralog, dxs1, vte5, and vte7) and a plastid S-adenosyl methionine transporter (samt1). Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping of these 13 gene loci revealed that they are predominantly regulated by cis-eQTL. Through a joint statistical analysis, we implicated cis-acting variants as responsible for colocalized eQTL and GWAS association signals. Our multiomics approach provided increased statistical power and mapping resolution to enable a detailed characterization of the genetic and regulatory architecture underlying tocochromanol accumulation in maize grain and provided insights for ongoing biofortification efforts to breed and/or engineer vitamin E and antioxidant levels in maize and other cereals.

Year published

2022

Authors

Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tanaka, Ryokei; Wood, Joshua C.; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; Bornowski, Nolan; Hamilton, John P.; Vaillancourt, Brieanne; Diepenbrock, Christine H.; Li, Xianran; Deason, Nicholas T.; Schoenbaum, Gregory R.; Yu, Jianming; Buell, C. Robin; DellaPenna, Dean; Gore, Michael A.

Citation

Wu, Di; Li, Xiaowei; Tanaka, Ryokei; Wood, Joshua C.; Tibbs-Cortes, Laura E.; Magallanes-Lundback, Maria; et al. 2022. Combining GWAS and TWAS to identify candidate causal genes for tocochromanol levels in maize grain. Genetics 221(4): iyac091. https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyac091

Keywords

Maize; Health; Genes; Biofortification; Vitamin E

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyac091 Source record

Record type

Journal Article