Deborah (Dee) Rubin the co-director of Cultural Practice, LLC. She co-founded Cultural Practice determined to use anthropology, with its focus on context and cultural knowledge, to improve outcomes in international development. Dee works closely with groups leading the gender and agriculture development agenda, including USAID, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She is a core team member of the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project (GAAP2), led by IFPRI, and has shaped the qualitative research supporting the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and WEAI for Value Chains (WEAI4VC).
As co-lead of the cross-cutting themes team in the Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement, Dee coordinates activities focused on gender, youth, resilience, diversity and nutrition.
Dee enjoys engaging the next generation of agricultural researchers to address gender issues and adopt mixed methods. She has worked extensively with both the land grant and private university communities, evaluating USAID-funded agricultural research grants and leading a team of agricultural scientists to identify new priorities for the agency’s investments in agriculture and natural resource management.
Dee holds a doctorate in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brown University. She is proficient in Swahili and French.