Dr. Wanida Lewis

Dr. Wanida Lewis has over ten years experience leading programs, strategic partnerships and economic evaluation initiatives throughout the African continent. Currently, she resides in Accra, Ghana working as a consultant for the Kaizen Company and director of WCAPS Ghana. Previously, she was a Senior Economic Program Advisor at the Department of State's Office of Global Women's Issues. In 2019, Dr. Lewis received a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow to work in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the U.S. Department of State. During her fellowship, she founded Young, Gifted, & Brown, LLC, a pipeline program supporting young Ghanaian women and entrepreneurs in STEM. In 2018, she was named by New America as one of thirty five "Black American National Security, and Foreign Policy Next Generation Leaders". In 2019, Young Professionals in Foreign Policy named her the "Gender Issues in Foreign Policy” Fellow. The Dr. Wanida E. Lewis Food Science Fellowship Award Endowment was established in 2013 to provide fellowship funding for underrepresented graduate students in the Department of Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences at North Carolina State University. She received a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from Saint Augustine’s University, a master’s degree in Analytical Chemistry from North Carolina Central University and a doctoral degree in Food Science from North Carolina State University.