Festus Amadu Profile

Festus Amadu applies state-of-the art econometric approaches like instrumental variable techniques, spatial econometrics, and social networks with some component of machine learning to understand the adoption, impacts, and pathways of climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation approaches at various spatial scales across diverse contexts. He is a teacher-scholar with publications in high-impact field and transdisciplinary journals like Climate Policy, World Development, Ecological Economics, Food Policy, and Agricultural Systems. Dr. Amadu has extensive research, teaching, and project management skills and experience related to sustainable agriculture, food security, natural resource management, and international development in African countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Malawi.
Prior to becoming an assistant professor, Dr. Amadu served as postdoctoral scholar in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, where he carried out research on the socioeconomic dimensions of forests, trees, and livelihoods in Africa, with primary focus on forests in Liberia and trees on farms in Malawi and Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. He also served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he worked on projects funded by the US-Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented in several countries across Africa and elsewhere.

Dr. Amadu earned his PhD from the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a concentration in Natural Resource and Environmental Economics in August 2018. His doctoral studies were supported by a Borlaug LEAP Fellowship. He holds a double Master of Science degrees: One in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2014, and another in Agricultural Economics from Njala University in Sierra Leone in 2006. He obtained a Bachelor of Science with honors in Agricultural Economics from the University of Sierra Leone in 2004.

He has also received several grants both as an individual and as part of various teams that he has been privileged to work on. Dr. Amadu has on-going project collaborations in sub-Saharan Africa (Liberia and Malawi), Latin America (Guatemala), and Asia (Nepal and Bhutan) and hopes to translate his international experience to his teaching and scholarship at FGCU. And he is passionate about establishing interdisciplinary research working group that is inclusive of faculty, postdocs, and graduate and undergraduate students to undertake rigorous impact assessment research on climate policy related topics like climate change adaptation, resilience, mitigation, food, and livelihood security, as well as environmental sustainability in South-West Florida and beyond.