Teaching staff

Rodolfo M. Nayga, Jr. is a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Texas A&M University. He served as Department Head from August 2021 to July 2025. Dr. Nayga’s research interests include the economics of food valuation, consumption, policy, and health. Before rejoining Texas A&M University in 2021, Dr. Nayga was a distinguished Professor and the Tyson Endowed Chair in Food Policy Economics at the University of Arkansas. He was also a faculty member at Rutgers University and at Massey University, New Zealand. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, adjunct professor at Korea University and Norwegian Institute for Bio-economy Research, NBER research economist, and senior research fellow of the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo. He was also a member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), and served as Editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) and AAEA’s President. 

Jayson Lusk is a professor, Vice President and Dean at the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Oklahoma State University, USA.  He earned a BS in Food Technology from Texas Tech University and a PhD in Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University.  He held previous appointments at Mississippi State and Oklahoma State Universities and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. Lusk is a food and agricultural economist who studies what we eat and why. He has been interviewed and published editorials in prominent outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington Post, and has appeared on numerous network and national cable television shows.  

Lusk has published more than 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including several of the most cited papers in the agricultural economics profession.  He has authored five books, the latest being Unnaturally Delicious.  Lusk has received numerous awards, including the Borlaug Communication Award from the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology and the Lou Ann Aday award, Purdue University’s most prestigious research award in the humanities and social sciences. He has served on the executive committee of the USDA National Agricultural Research, Extension, Education, and Economics (NAREEE) Advisory Board and has testified before the U.S. Congress on multiple occasions.  He is a fellow and past president of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. 

Claudia Bazzani is an associate professor at the Department of Management of the University of Verona, where she specializes in agricultural economics and agri-food marketing. She holds a PhD from the University of Bologna in Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences and Technologies (Curriculum Agricultural and Food Policy and Economics) and spent 2 years as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Arkansas (USA). 

She has participated, either as principal investigator or as a team member, in numerous competitive national and international research projects.

Her research interests encompass the analysis of agricultural and wine systems, wine tourism, and the marketing of wine and food, with a particular focus on consumer behavior. She specialised in the use of experimental methods, including experimental auctions and choice experiments, to assess how individuals evaluate product and service attributes. 

She has presented her research at more than 30 international conferences and published peer-reviewed articles in numerous scientific journals, including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the European Review of Agricultural Economics, Economic Inquiry, the Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Economics, and Food Policy, among others.