The Human Welfare Lab was founded by an international student at UGA to bridge food security research
with real community action: mentoring students, reducing food insecurity, and building belonging across
diverse backgrounds globally and across North America.
The Human Welfare Lab was founded by an international student who arrived at the University of Georgia
in 2024 and experienced firsthand the mixture of excitement, anxiety, and culture shock that greets so
many newcomers. Confronted by new food, new systems, and new communities, that lived experience became
the seed of something larger. Rather than simply adapt, our founder set out to build: creating spaces
where students could hold roundtable discussions, volunteer their knowledge, address food insecurity,
and find genuine belonging. HWL grew out of that impulse: the belief that community is built through
small, inclusive acts, and that rigorous research and grassroots action are not opposites but partners.
About the Lab
The Human Welfare Lab is a research-to-policy lab focused on improving the effectiveness of food
assistance and social protection programs for households most vulnerable to hunger and poverty. Our work
sits at the intersection of food economics, nutrition, and public policy, with a commitment to
generating actionable evidence for decision-makers.
We study policies and programs such as food assistance, targeted subsidies, school feeding, emergency
response, and conditional cash transfers, examining their impacts on food security, diet quality, and
household financial resilience. The Lab works globally and across North America, enabling comparative
learning across diverse contexts: rural and urban settings, different program delivery systems, and
varied market conditions.
We collaborate with government agencies, NGOs, and research partners to build evaluation strategies,
strengthen monitoring systems, and translate findings into practical recommendations. Our approach
combines rigorous causal methods with grounded program knowledge, ensuring our results are both credible
and usable.
Our Values
Equity
Centering the needs of vulnerable populations in all our work
Rigor
Applying the highest standards of causal inference and methods
Transparency
Sharing data, code, and methods to enable reproducibility
Local Partnership
Building capacity and collaborating with on-the-ground experts