Tammara Soma

Dr. Tammara Soma is the Research Director and Co-Founder of the Food Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University, where she is an Assistant Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management. She conducts research on issues pertaining to food system planning, food loss and waste, digital agriculture, responsible innovation, and the circular food economy.  She holds a PhD in Planning from the University of Toronto, where she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography and Planning and the Food Equity Coordinator at New College. Her dissertation investigated the factors that influence urban household food consumption and food-wasting practices in Indonesia, and the ways in which food systems consideration can improve urban planning decision-making. She is a co-editor with C. Reynolds, J. Lazell, and C. Spring of the Routledge Handbook of Food Waste. She has also written for Al Jazeera, HuffPost, Policy Options, and is frequently interviewed by media such as the BBC, Global News, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, CBC, TVO’s “The Agenda,” and more.  She is a 2014 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Doctoral Scholar, a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships Doctoral Fellow through the Social Sciences and Humanities research Council (SSHRC), an International Development Research Centre Doctoral Award recipient, and a SSHRC Top 5 Storyteller finalist.

Dr. Soma’s research projects are funded by the SSHRC New Frontiers in Research Fund, SSHRC Trans-Atlantic Platform, SSHRC Insight, and a Weston Foundation Seeding Food Innovation Grant. She co-led a tri-country team (US, Mexico and Canada) on a Commission for Environmental Cooperation project to develop toolkits for youth engagement in food-loss and food-waste reduction.

Dr. Soma was selected as a committee member of the US National Academy of Science’s “A Systems Approach to Reducing Consumer Food Waste” and contributed to the publication of the consensus study A National Strategy to Reduce Food Waste at the Consumer Level.

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