Tara Mittelberg is a Ph.D. student in the UW-Madison Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics (AAE) and Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). She is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and UW University Fellow. She has been a member of the Gibbs lab since 2021. Her research centers on agricultural sustainability, particularly in international supply chains that originate in tropical forest landscapes. She uses econometric methods to evaluate environmental and social outcomes of policies by private- and public-sector actors. Her current focus is on modern slave labor in cattle supply chains in Brazil.

Previously, Tara was an analyst at NORC at the University of Chicago, where she researched international agricultural development, forced labor in garment supply chains in Bangladesh, and land-use and forest governance in West Africa. She was also a Fulbright Scholar in Londrina, Brazil, where she studied social barriers to the prevention of herbicide-resistant weeds. Tara received a Joint M.S. in Agricultural & Applied Economics and Environment & Resources from UW-Madison in 2023, and a B.A. in Environmental Sciences and International Studies from Northwestern University in 2017.

In her free time, she likes to run, rock climb, and read books in one of Madison’s many lakeside parks.