Professor Janet Poppendieck has taught Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York, since 1976. She received her undergraduate degree in History from Duke University (‘67) and her Masters (‘72) and PhD (‘79) degrees from the Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis University. From 1988 until 2001, she served as director of the Hunter College Center for the Study of Family Policy, where she helped to start the Welfare Rights Initiative, the Community Interpreter Project, and the Language Diversity Initiative. Her primary concerns, both as a scholar and as an activist, have been poverty, hunger, and food assistance in the United States. A 1984-1987 W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellow, she has traveled widely in both the U.S. and the developing world. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Advisory Committees of City-as-School and the Welfare Rights Initiative. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Woody Goldberg; they are the parents of Amanda Goldberg. Professor Poppendieck is currently a member of the Department's Personnel and Budget Committee.