Professor Wendy Umberger is directly responsible to the Minister for Foreign Affairs and was appointed CEO in 2023. As agency head, the CEO manages the administrative and financial affairs of ACIAR and its staff.
Professor Umberger has played influential roles in sustainable agriculture for over 20 years. From 2013 to 2022, she founded and led the Centre for Global Food and Resources at the University of Adelaide, which engaged with policymakers and industry to make positive changes in agriculture, food, and resource systems. Professor Umberger has also served as President of Australia’s Policy Advisory Council (for International Agricultural Research and Development) from 2020 to 2023 and was on the Board of Trustees of the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) from 2015 to 2021.
Professor Umberger is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Agriculture and Food at the University of Melbourne and an expert in agricultural economics, development, and food policy. She has worked on food system issues across the Indo-Pacific region and led interdisciplinary value chain research projects in Asia, Australia, North America, the Pacific Islands and South Africa. Her research has explored opportunities for smallholder agricultural households to produce high-value (horticulture, dairy, beef) food products and adopt new technology to access modern food value chains.
Professor Umberger is also a Director of the International Association of Agricultural Economists, a board member of Food Bank SA, an Honorary Fellow of Food Standards Australia New Zealand, a Distinguished Fellow of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society and served as an Independent Director of Grain Producers South Australia (GPSA) for six years. Wendy has a B.S. in Animal Science (1996), an M.S. in Economics (1998) from South Dakota State University and a PhD in Agricultural Economics (2001) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.