Tufts – Feinstein International Center

Erin Lentz is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores food security; gender, nutrition, and agriculture linkages; and U.S. food aid and food assistance policies. Lentz is currently pursuing three research agendas. With her collaborators, she has developed the Women’s Empowerment in Nutrition Index and is field testing it. Lentz studies U.S. and international food aid and food assistance policies, informing her 2018 Congressional testimony on reforming food aid. She also researches innovative approaches to improving early warning for food insecurity crises in southern Africa.

Lentz received a Fulbright fellowship to Bangladesh in 2006-7 and has worked with numerous NGOs and international agencies. She has published over twenty journal articles and one book.

Lentz holds a Ph.D. in sociology, an M.S. in applied economics and management, and a B.A. in economics from Cornell University.

In her spare time, she enjoys hiking with her family and dog.

Feinstein Publications

Early Warning and Early Action for Increased Resilience of Livelihoods in IGAD Region

By Daniel Maxwell, Erin Lentz, Cori Simmons, Gregory Gottlieb | June 2021

Multiple calls have been issued for better preparedness, early warning, and, above all, early action to prevent hunger and malnutrition, reduce the scale of food insecurity, improve resilience, and reduce…

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Seeing in the Dark: Real-Time Monitoring in Humanitarian Crises

By Daniel Maxwell, Erin Lentz, Kamau Wanjohi, Daniel Molla, Matthew Day, Peter Hailey, Christopher Newton, Anna Colom | March 2021

This paper reviews real-time monitoring (RTM), how it fits into a humanitarian information system, how systems quickly adjusted toward RTM in 2020, and provides a series of case studies of RTM systems, their objectives, and their outcomes. 

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