Patricia Allen has been named director of UCSC's Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) by Social Sciences Dean Sheldon Kamieniecki.
Allen, whose appointment took effect July 1, 2007, had been serving as acting director since January 2007. She joined the campus's Agroecology Program in 1984.
Allen is one of the nation's leading scholars on the social aspects of sustainable food systems. Her work addresses issues such as labor, gender, and access to food. She is the author of Together at the Table: Sustainability and Sustenance in the American Agrifood System (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004) and editor of Food for the Future: Conditions and Contradictions of Sustainability (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993).
Allen earned a B.S. in political economy of natural resources from UC Berkeley, an M.S. in international agricultural development from UC Davis, and a Ph.D. in sociology from UCSC in 1998.
