TCI Summer Internship experience is featured in periodiCALS: the magazine of Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (Vol 5, Issue 2, 2015).

“Name? Son of or Wife of?,” the check-in form at the hotel asked me. The form was practically telling me I needed to be someone’s son or wife to be occupying a room in a hotel by myself. That it wouldn’t be socially acceptable if was I doing so being someone’s daughter. Or a single…

For the past 7 weeks, the TCi team has been working closely with our partner organization ICRISAT to study household and individual dietary diversity.  Finishing a research project within 7 weeks is no easy feat. Aside from the two back to back weeks of data collection spent immersed in the villages, we also had a…

By John Lowry John Lowry is a TCi intern and undergraduate senior studying biology and government. Alongside the other interns at ICRISAT, he studies individual and household dietary diversity with a special focus on the consumption of packaged foods and foods prepared outside of the home. Below, John reflects on how junk food has made…

We are pleased to announce two newcomers to the Tata-Cornell Institute. Ms. Megan Witwer joins the TCI staff as a Research Support Specialist and Dr. Mathew Abraham has come on board as a TCI Fellow. Welcome to TCI!

Maureen Valentine is a TCi Scholar and a second year Ph.D student in the department of Animal Science. For her research, she plans to focus on the widespread deficit of biomass for animal consumption in India. Comments in this blog are Maureen’s perspective as an non-Indian animal scientist considering animal health and welfare in the…

Focus group discussions (FGD) serve as a useful research methodology to gather qualitative data on a specific topic of interest.  As the intern team working on the MNDA with ICRISAT, we are particularly interested in understanding how eating out behavior and packaged food consumption influence dietary diversity at the individual and household level. Over the…

After working in the tribal villages of Ronhe and Gopla in the Khunti district, we are now in a new district called Koderma. Koderma is in the north of Jharkhand, bordering the state of Bihar. We are continuing our work to determine the impact of AguaClara’s water purification system based on economic and health indicators. In Koderma, we…

I was cornered. The lady we were surveying held out a glass of water in one hand, as she held her child in the other. “Thank you, but I’ve had enough to drink,” I said smiling. I did not want to be impolite, so how else do you express gratitude universally? Smile. Apparently she took…

Few things made me happier this week than walking into a home and seeing hugs and hearing welcomes between old friends. This week in Dokur, a rural village that ICRISAT has been working with since 1975, I got to see that just about four times a day. Dora and I said goodbye to our other team…