Akhter Ahmed is the Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit. He is also the Chief of Party of the Feed the Future Bangladesh Research Activity. Since joining IFPRI in 1990, he has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and the undernutrition of the poor in developing countries. In his first years at IFPRI, he worked on targeted interventions and participated in designing the innovative food for education program in Bangladesh, and then served as the leader of IFPRI's collaborative project on food security research in Egypt. He also worked on poverty and human development issues in Bangladesh, China, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey. Since 2010, Ahmed has been posted in Bangladesh where he led the Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP) for Food Security and Agricultural Development. Before joining IFPRI, Akhter also worked with the World Bank and served as an Agricultural Economist for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). He received a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Colorado State University and a master’s in Agricultural Economics from Cornell University.