Featuring Professor Reid Whitlock. Stories from the Field is a set of intimate, leadership-oriented events where people in the Harvard AgriFood community can hear career learnings, personal stories, and industry insights from pioneers making an impact in the agri-food sector. Our third installment features Professor Reid Whitlock.

Whitlock’s career has been characterized by frequent movements between three spheres: the international donor-financed development sphere, the academic sphere and the military sphere. Within the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Danish International Development Agency he has held positions of high-profile (as U.S. civilian Governor during the post-invasion occupation in two separate provinces in Iraq and senior advisor to the Burkina Faso Ministry of Agriculture and Water) , international sensitivity (as head of the 1.5 billion dollar part of the Oil For Food Program in Iraq responsible for oil production and equipment purchase) and political importance (as head of USAID in Abuja, Nigeria). In the academic arena, he has taught graduate students, executives and professionals as a member of the business or economics faculty of universities in Denmark, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Rwanda and the United States, always drawing on his real-world, hands-on field experience as a practitioner and manager to make the concepts he has taught – in agribusiness, agricultural economics, strategy and trade -- meaningful and credible. In the military sphere, he is a decorated defense attaché-trained U.S. Army Special Forces commander with counter-terrorism, special operations, scenario planning, logistics and troop leadership experience. Additionally, he has taught officers at both the Army Judge Advocate General School, the Special Warfare Center and the War College of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

 Reid Whitlock has led four different institutions, The Tony Elumelu Foundation – one of Africa’s most important and well-endowed philanthropies -- in Lagos, Nigeria, the School of Finance and Banking (now, the University of Rwanda)  – one of Africa’s pre-eminent universities -- in Kigali, Rwanda, the South Sudan and Rwanda activities of  the international consulting firm On The Frontier (OTF) – a spin-off of the Monitor Group, and  the U.S. Government Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Diyala and Taji provinces in Iraq . He has also held the post of Senior Instructor of the War College of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in Juba, Southern Sudan, where his counterparts were the Major Generals and Brigadier Generals who had successfully led the region’s 24 year long liberation struggle. The work involved post-conflict reconciliation, nation-building – from infrastructure to diplomacy to sound policy foundations, disarmament, child-soldier demobilization, de-mining, and identifying appropriate roles for soon-to-retire generals to play in Southern Sudan’s development and stability.