About

Caitlín Eilís (Caitie) Barrett is an archaeologist specializing in the study of everyday life, religious experience, and cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. She is a 2022 National Geographic Explorer and currently co-directs an excavation at Pompeii. Barrett is working on a new book about the archaeology of ancient Greek religion. Her research has extensively explored interactions between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, with a focus on religious change and cultural hybridization. Her first book, Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion (2011), examined locally-made Egyptianizing terracotta figurines from the Hellenistic trading port of Delos, investigating their role in household cult and religious syncretism. Her second book, Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (2019), is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman domestic contexts, analyzing how representations of Egyptian landscapes in Pompeian gardens contributed to constructions of social identity and cultural interaction within the Roman household. Barrett's work has been supported by numerous national and international grants and awards, including from the National Geographic Society, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. At Cornell University, she is a faculty member in the Department of Classics and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Classical archaeology, ancient Greek religion and ritual, the archaeology of the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt in the Greco-Roman world, and the ancient Egyptian language and hieroglyphic script. She has excavated and surveyed archaeological sites spanning from the Bronze Age to the early modern period in Italy, Egypt, Greece, and the United States. Barrett's research emphasizes the importance of domestic and household contexts in understanding ancient social, political, economic, and religious change, highlighting the agency of material culture in shaping cultural identities and experiences.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Geography
• Business
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economic growth
• Computer Security
• Machine Learning
• Data Mining
• Mathematics
• Econometrics
• Medicine
• Environmental economics
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Natural resource economics
• Environmental resource management
• Process management
• Virology
• Marketing
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Data science
• Biology

Selected publications

• Strategies for achieving healthy, sustainable, and equitable dietary transitions

  Science · 2026-04-02 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  The industrialization of global food systems has led to dietary changes that harm both health and the environment. If global food systems are to meet the needs of a growing population for healthy, environmentally sustainable, and affordable diets, substantial changes will be required. In this Review, we synthesize growing empirical evidence on the complexity of factors that influence consumer dietary and farmer production choices, especially the roles of public and private entities that shape food environments. We outline promising interventions to help facilitate beneficial global dietary transitions, including research and development for product innovation, regulation of food environments, and food assistance and food-as-medicine programs. Understanding and aligning the motives and incentives of various food system actors is essential to achieve improved health, environment, and equity outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Rice–fish co-culturing reduces schistosomiasis risk and increases yields and incomes

  Nature Sustainability · 2026-05-11

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Agrifood value chain employment and compensation shift with structural transformation

  Nature Food · 2025-09-10 · 5 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Nowcasting Disruptions to Human Capital Formation: Evidence from High-Frequency Household and Geospatial Data in Rural Malawi

  Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks · 2025-09-03

  bookOpen accessSenior author

  Exposure to extreme weather events and other adverse shocks has led to an increasing number of humanitarian crises in developing countries in recent years. These events cause acute suffering and compromise future welfare by adversely impacting human capital formation among vulnerable populations. Early and accurate detection of adverse shocks to food security, health, and schooling is critical to facilitating timely and well-targeted humanitarian interventions to minimize these detrimental effects. Yet monitoring data are rarely available with the frequency and spatial granularity needed. This paper uses high-frequency household survey data from the Rapid Feedback Monitoring System, collected in 2020–23 in southern Malawi, to explore whether combining monthly data with publicly available remote-sensing features improves the accuracy of machine learning extrapolations across time and space, thereby enhancing monitoring efforts. In the sample, illnesses and schooling disruptions are not reliably predicted. However, when both lagged outcome data and geospatial features are available, intertemporal and spatiotemporal prediction of food insecurity indicators is promising.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding the persistence of rice residue burning in northwestern India: A mixed methods approach

  Agricultural Systems · 2025-10-16 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The incidence of grocery taxes in <scp>US</scp> food and factor markets

  American Journal of Agricultural Economics · 2025-12-03

  article

  Abstract We study the incidence of county‐level grocery sales taxes across the United States from 2010 to 2019. We find substantial grocery tax over‐shifting to consumers. On average, a grocery tax that generates $1 in grocery tax revenue leads to a $1.44 rise in tax‐inclusive consumer food prices. This tax over‐shifting is even higher for lower‐income households and shoppers at discount and dollar stores. The grocery tax incidence varies significantly among foods, with over‐shifting highest for perishable staples. The increased retail margins arising from grocery tax over‐shifting do not translate into increased earnings for food retail workers nor higher farmgate prices for farmers.

  PublisherDOI

• Spatial Heterogeneity in Machine Learning-Based Poverty Mapping: Where Do Models Underperform?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Index-based Livestock insurance to support pastoralists against droughts

  Food Policy · 2025-06-24 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  • Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) was developed to reduce the impact of droughts on pastoral households. • Research articles published in Food Policy have contributed to the growing knowledge on IBLI and its use. • This research has motivated and supported large private and public investments in the product. • Currently, IBLI has been scaled across much of the drylands in the Horn of Africa. Policy Comments do not include an abstract. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/311580/call-for-policy-comments-for-food-policy).

  PublisherDOI

• The Probability of Food Security: A new longitudinal data set using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

  ArXiv.org · 2025-09-07

  preprintOpen access

  The study of food security dynamics in the U.S. has long been impeded by the lack of extended longitudinal observations of the same households or individuals. This paper applies a newly-introduced household-level food security measure, the probability of food security (PFS), to 26 waves of Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, spanning 1979-2019, to generate a data product we describe and make newly available to the research community. We detail the construction of this unprecedentedly long food security panel data series in PSID data. Finally, we estimate key subpopulation- and national-level food security dynamics identifiable over the 40-year (1979-2019) period spanning multiple recessions and federal nutrition assistance policy changes, including disaggregated dynamics based on geography, race, sex, and educational attainment.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fostering Healthy, Equitable, Resilient, and Sustainable Agri‐Food Value Chains

  Agricultural Economics · 2025-03-12 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The need for agrifood systems transformation to improve economic, environmental, equity, and health outcomes is widely recognized. Attention typically focuses on changing farming practices, consumers’ dietary choices, or both. Midstream agrifood value chain actors, who intermediate between primary producers and food consumers, too often get overlooked. This paper explains the importance of inducing midstream agrifood value chain actors to become active agents of agrifood systems transformation, discusses policy tools that can accelerate needed changes, and highlights key topics for future economics research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Risk Sharing and Social Networks in Village Ghana: Experimental Evidence

  NSF · $29k · 2009–2011

• DISES: Integrating Socio-Economic and Environmental Interventions to Improve Well-Being in Vulnerable Communities

  NSF · $1.6M · 2023–2027

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Identity and Social Networks on Investment and Market Participation Behavior: An Analysis from Rural South India

  NSF · $27k · 2007–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Wendy S. Tzou

  73 shared

• Amneet Sandhu

  VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System

  72 shared

• Ryan G. Aleong

  University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

  72 shared

• Alexis Z. Tumolo

  71 shared

• Erin Lentz

  67 shared

• Lukasz Cerbin

  63 shared

• Syed Rafay Ali Sabzwari

  University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

  63 shared

• John G. McPeak

  Syracuse University

  58 shared

Labs

• The Casa della Regina Carolina Project at PompeiiPI

Awards & honors

• James R. Wiseman Book Award (2026)
• Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Award for Excellence in Advising…
• Rosenthal Advancement Award (2022)