Dr Sophie Lamond

Dr Sophie Lamond is a research fellow in social procurement at Melbourne School of Government.  Her particular interest in social and sustainable procurement is the role of institutions as actors and their potential to drive social and sustainable transformations. This includes the role of ‘anchor institutions,’ or, large organisations which use their place-based power, as well as their scale and economic output to support novel modes of community economic development.

She has research interests across food systems and food policy, as well as: healthy, equitable and sustainable futures; community-led change, civil-society activism and systems change from the individual to institutional spheres; education governance and higher education policy; and complexity, wicked problems and systems thinking.

Sophie has recently completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne during which she researched institutional food environments with a focus on how universities develop and implement comprehensive food policies that create healthier, more sustainable, just, and equitable food environments. Sophie completed four months fieldwork visiting US university campuses, spending time as a visiting student fellow at the University of California, Berkeley department of Environmental Science Policy and Management. Sophie holds a Master of Environment from the University of Melbourne with a focus on sustainable food systems. During that degree she completed research on international food corporations, public health nutrition and corporate social responsibility. Prior to this she gained a Bachelor of Arts with a first-class honours degree from the Australian National University.

Sophie has worked on several community food projects including work as a director of Fair Food Challenge, an NGO which empowers young people to transform campus foodscapes and take an active role in policy development. Sophie started the Melbourne chapter of the Youth Food Movement and has been involved with the Right to Food Coalition and Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. She regularly speaks, teaches, and writes about contemporary food politics and policy issues.