Aurélie Harou's research on global food security has brought her to work in many countries including Guatemala, Ghana, Malawi, Tanzania, Philippines and Nepal where she has partnered with various local and international organizations to conduct her work, including the World Food Program, Catholic Relief Services, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization and the World Bank. Harou obtained a BSc from the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, in Environmental Science and Geography and later an MSc from the University of California at Davis in Agricultural and Resource Economics. She worked for several years first for the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency on the National Flood Insurance Program and later as a consultant for an economics litigation company in Berkeley, California. After living in D.R. Congo for a year doing humanitarian work for Action Against Hunger, she pursued a PhD in Applied Economics at Cornell University. She then joined the Agriculture and Food Security group at Columbia University as an Earth Institute post-doctoral fellow.