astronomy

William A. Masters

William A. Masters is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand William A. Masters rather than just read about it. In short: William Alan Masters (born April 23, 1961) is an American economist, teaching and conducting research on agricultural economics and food policy in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, where he also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics. Education William A.

Key takeaways

William A. Masters belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect William A. Masters to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of William A. Masters from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

William Alan Masters (born April 23, 1961) is an American economist, teaching and conducting research on agricultural economics and food policy in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, where he also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics.

Education William A. Masters was educated in the U.S. and France then attended Deep Springs College (1979–81) before transferring to Yale University for a BA (1984) in Economics & Political Science. He received his PhD (1991) in Applied Economics from Stanford University, through the Food Research Institute.

Career He served as a Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe (1989–90), and then was a faculty member in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University (1991-2010), with leave years at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2000) and the Earth Institute at Columbia University (2003–04). He served as co-editor of the journal Agricultural Economics from 2006 to 2011, and moved to Tufts in 2010 where he served as chair of the Department of Food and Nutrition Policy from 2011 to 2014.

Awards In 2026, he was awarded the Borgstrom Prize in Global Food Security from the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Stockholm. He is also a Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition (FASN), elected in 2025, and since 2020 also a Fellow of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association from which he received the Bruce Gardner Memorial Prize for Applied Policy Analysis (2013) for work on pay-for-performance contributing to the World Bank's AgResults program, the Publication of Enduring Quality Award (2014) for work on climatic factors in economic growth, the Quality of Research Discovery Award (2019) for work on caregiver incentives in child nutrition, and the Quality of Communications Award (2022) for work on cost and affordability of nutritious diets. He is also an International Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economists (2010), and as a student he was supported by a Harry S. Truman Scholarship (1981), a Fulbright Dissertation Research Grant (1988) among other awards.

Publications Together with Amelia B. Finaret, he is the author of the widely-used textbook Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health, and the related Handbook of Agricultural Economics section on "The economics of malnutrition: Dietary transition and food system transformation". He began his career working on farm productivity and food markets, starting with two years of farm household surveys in Zimbabwe whose results were published as a book entitled Government and Agriculture in Zimbabwe. While on the faculty at Purdue University he conducted fieldwork and teaching across Southern, Eastern and Western Africa, including early use of climate data to identify the role of winter frosts in economic development. From that period of his career he co-authored a textbook entitled Economics of Agricultural Development: World Food Systems and Resource Use (4th edition, 2021). After moving to Tufts in 2010 he focused on the economics of nutrition, including pioneering work on caregiver incentives, on the composition of infant foods, and most recently on the development of new price indexes for the cost and affordability of healthy diets. This new approach to measuring food security was introduced by the FAO in 2020 for the annual UN agency flagship report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, and since 2022 has been used for annual global monitoring jointly by the FAO and the World Bank, as well as monitoring within countries by national government agencies in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, Pakistan and elsewhere.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with William A. Masters

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what William A. Masters claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to William A. Masters before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about William A. Masters ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of William A. Masters

In research: William A. Masters appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses William A. Masters in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: William A. Masters is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1961 births, Agricultural economists, Deep Springs College alumni, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for William A. Masters outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study William A. Masters in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what William A. Masters means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain William A. Masters out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is William A. Masters in simple terms?

Why does William A. Masters matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study William A. Masters?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on William A. Masters.