Barbara Becker is Director for Global Transformation Affairs and as such member of the Management Team of ETH Global. Formerly, she was Managing Director of the North-South Centre of ETH Zurich in charge of research collaboration with developing countries and countries in transition. A large part of the programme has been focused on the collaboration with Centres of the CGIAR.

Barbara Becker’s professional background is in tropical agro-ecology with research on vegetation ecology of Andean land use systems in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia and on edible wild plants in arid zones of Africa.

She has served on the Boards of Trustees of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and of the African Rice Centre (WARDA). Until 2008, she was Vice-Chair of the Steering Committee of the European Forum for Agricultural Research for Development (EFARD) and member of the Steering Committee of the Global Forum for Agricultural Research (GFAR).