Professor Renato Andrin (Rene) Villano

Biography

Rene Villano is a Professor of Economics whose work spans agricultural economics, applied econometrics, development economics, and socio-economics. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. His expertise covers efficiency and productivity analysis, farming systems research, farmer behaviour and technology adoption, gender, poverty and food security, agribusiness supply chains, and impact evaluation. With over 20 years of experience in international development, he has led socio-economics teams in several large multidisciplinary research-for-development projects across the Asia–Pacific and African regions. He continues to collaborate actively with researchers and academic partners in these regions.

As an educator and experienced higher degree research supervisor, he has successfully supervised more than 30 PhD candidates, as well as numerous Masters and Honours students. He teaches in the areas of business analytics, statistics, econometrics, and research methods, and is a recipient of the UNE Award for Teaching Excellence and the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE).

Rene has published in leading international and regional journals. He holds Adjunct Professorships at the University of the Philippines – Mindanao and the University of Mataram, Indonesia. His previous appointments include Assistant Scientist and Visiting Research Fellow at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, Philippines, and Honorary Professor at the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology, China. He formerly served as Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics and currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics and the ASEAN Journal of Economics, Management, and Accounting.