Nora Lapitan
Dr. Nora Lapitan is the Lead for the Research Community of Practice in the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security at USAID. In this role, she oversees the bureau’s Feed the Future research portfolio. She also leads the Input Systems Division within the Center of Agriculture Led Growth, which supports the development of innovations and technologies from agriculture research and the creation of delivery pathways for those innovations.
Nora Lapitan was a Professor at Colorado State University, where she led a research program to understand the genetics of economically important traits in cereal crops. Prior to joining USAID, she served as Program Director at the National Science Foundation.
Nora Lapitan has received many awards for her contributions in research, including the 2020 USAID award for Science and Technology, Distinguished Scholar Award from the Agronomic Science Foundation, Plenary speaker for the Betty Klepper Endowed Lectureship at the 2020 Crop Science Society of America meeting. She is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Crop Science Society of America, and the American Society of Agronomy.