Matthew MacLachlan is a research economist in the Food Markets branch of the Food Economics Division at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. His research focuses on forecasting food prices. He has also studied the effect of natural disasters and infectious diseases on livestock producers and animal-product markets. He has developed approaches for quantifying the impacts of infectious diseases when data are scarce, responses are delayed, or to quantify the effect when it is difficult to isolate the impact from other changes.