12 Facts About Scott Rozelle

Scott Douglas Rozelle is an American development economist currently serving as a researcher at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and one of the co-directors of the Rural Education Action Program at Stanford University.

Scott Rozelle was born on a ranch located in Los Angeles, California in 1955 as a fifth-generation Californian.

Scott Rozelle's father was an agricultural economist who owned a commercial agribusiness magazine that initially introduced agriculture to him.

At the time, few high schools in the country could provide Chinese classes to students; however, since the US government made efforts to enhance Chinese language education even before its diplomatic relations with China were re-established, Scott Rozelle was able to learn Chinese at his own junior high school in 1966, at the age of 12.

In 1974, Scott Rozelle was completing his undergraduate studies at Cornell University but eventually stayed in Taiwan for three years through a student exchange program, although he originally planned to stay there for only three months.

Nevertheless, the plan was not successful and Scott Rozelle ended up leaving school temporarily to work until about two years later, he was sent to China by Cornell as an instructor of Western economics upon receiving an invitation from Nanjing Agricultural University.

In 1995, with the joint effort from Jikun Huang, a Chinese agricultural economist he met during a meeting of the International Rice Research Institute in Manila, Philippines, Scott Rozelle co-founded the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy that later became a part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China.

Scott Rozelle was an assistant professor at the Food Research Institute at Stanford University through 1990 to 1997 and started serving as a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis since 1997.

Since 2006, Scott Rozelle has been a Helen Farnsworth Endowed Senior Fellow at both the Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies and the Department of Economics at Stanford.

Scott Rozelle knows Chinese well and his research is mostly associated with agricultural policies, economic institutions, and poverty and inequality in China.

In Guizhou and other regions in southern China where climates are similar, Scott Rozelle discovered that intestinal parasites were affecting several million school-aged children.

Scott Rozelle's team filed relevant reports to local governments in 2010 in an attempt to highlight the seriousness, but the issue had not been resolved promptly, as Scott Rozelle observed in another visit to Guizhou 3 years later that parasites still persisted.