MEET OUR MENTORS

Click on the names below to read about RIC’s Mentor Cohort in the 2020-2021 Year!

Dr. Bocar Ba
Assistant Professor
University of California, Irvine

Dr. Britta Augsburg
Associate Director
Institute for Fiscal Studies

Dr. Christopher Neilson
Assistant Professor
Princeton University

Dr. Claudia Sahm
Founder
Stay-at-Home Macro (SAHM) Consulting

Dr. Edward C. Norton
Professor
University of Michigan

Dr. Guanyi Yang
Assistant Professor
St. Lawrence University

Dr. Ian McCarthy
Associate Professor
Emory University

Dr. James Habyarimana
Associate Professor
Georgetown University

Dr. James Cust
Economist
World Bank

Dr. Kehinde Ajayi
Economist
World Bank

Dr. Johannes Haushofer
Assistant Professor
Stockholm University

Dr. Laura Schechter
Professor
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dr. John Friedman
Professor
Brown University

Dr. Leonard Wantchekon
Professor
Princeton University

Dr. Kate Vyborny
Associate Director
DevLab, Duke University

Dr. Martin Gaynor
Professor
Carnegie Mellon University

Past Research in color mentor Cohorts:

2019-2020 MENTOR COHORT

Dr. Bocar Ba is an Assistant Professor of Economics, studying police accountability. Using insight from labor economics literature, he seeks to understand police use of force, overall police officer behavior and what cities want from their local law enforcement. His research, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Pipeline Grant, has been featured in Science, Journal of Labor Economics, and the Washington Post. Dr. Ba earned his bachelor’s in economics and finance at the Université du Québec à Montréal and master’s in economics at the University of British Columbia. He completed his Ph.D. in public policy at the University of Chicago in 2018 and was hired as a postdoctoral scholar in the economics department at Duke University. He was then appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School Quattrone Center where he spent a year focusing on criminal justice system research.

Dr. Britta Augsburg is an Associate Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies based in London, United Kingdom. She is an applied development economist, with a particular interest in environmental influences on child (health) outcomes, how they interact with other inputs - such as nutrition and stimulation -, and how policy can be used to target improvements in a child’s environment. She has 15 years’ experience in design and implementation of complex evaluations in low and middle income countries, including India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Mongolia. Her recent studies have focused on understanding both demand and supply constraints for poor households to improve their sanitation environment.

Christopher Neilson is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University. He is an applied microeconomist and studies how to provide more equitable access to education. He was born in California but both of his parents are from Chile, Spanish is my first language, and he grew up among a community of other immigrants from Latin America. His family moved around a lot so he does not really have a home town, he lived a few years in California, Alaska, a brief stint in Brazil, and then back in Chile where he finished high school and college. He was extremely lucky to have stumbled upon a career as an academic and he realizes many students might be able to take better advantage of the opportunities they have if they know the “rules of the game” or had more guidance to navigate tough decisions.  For this reason, he finds it very motivating to mentor students interested in pursuing academic careers.

Dr. Claudia Sahm is founder of Stay-at-Home Macro (SAHM) Consulting. She is a regular opinion writer at Bloomberg and The New York Times. She has policy and research expertise on consumer spending, fiscal stimulus, and the financial well-being of households. She is the author of the "Sahm Rule," a reliable early signal of recessions that she developed as a way to automatically trigger stimulus payments to individuals in a recession. Previously, she was a section chief in the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board, where she oversaw the Survey of Household Economics and Decision making. Before that she worked for ten years in the Division of Research and Statistics on the staff’s macroeconomic forecast. She was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in 2015-2016. Sahm holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan (2007), and a bachelor’s degree in economics, political science, and German from Denison University (1998).

Dr. Edward C. Norton is a Professor in both the Department of Health Management and Policy and in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan and a member of the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. In addition to his affiliations with the University of Michigan, Prof. Norton is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Health Economics Program. His research interests in health economics include long-term care and aging, pay-for-performance, obesity, and econometrics. He was the Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. In 2003, before coming to Michigan, he taught at UNC at Chapel Hill and at Harvard Medical School. In 2018, the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan awarded him the Excellence in Research Award.

Dr. Guanyi Yang is an Assistant Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University. His research resides primarily within macroeconomics, with an emphasis on topics related to labor economics. One area of his work focuses on studying factors leading to life-cycle income inequality. The factors he studies include childhood household conditions, family wealth and college choice, and risk tolerance and occupation choices. The other area of his work studies how labor market frictions contribute to business cycle dynamics and welfare loss. The frictions in his work come from job nature, such as differences between formal and informal jobs, temporary and regular contracts, and racial discrimination in the labor market search-and-matching process. Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Ohio State University in 2018 and B.A. in Mathematics and Economics (with honors) from Ohio Wesleyan University in 2013. He grew up in a small town in central China and is a first-generation immigrant to the U.S. He is also a first-generation college graduate.

Dr. Ian McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Economics at Emory University and a Faculty Research Fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research examines the effects of institutions, policies, and market structure on health care pricing and delivery. The majority of his ongoing work studies the relationship between hospitals and physicians, and how this relationship may influence hospital production, pricing, and physician behaviors. He also researches issues related to information disclosure in health care, particularly concerning quality disclosure in health insurance markets. He received his PhD from Indiana University in 2008, and joined Emory University as an Assistant Professor in 2014. Prior to joining Emory University, he worked in litigation consulting with FTI Consulting in Dallas, TX, and was the director of health economics for the Baylor Scott and White Health Care System.

Dr. James Habyarimana is the Provost Distinguished Associate Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. His research is focused on identifying low-cost strategies to address barriers to better health and education outcomes in developing countries. Ongoing projects include research to understand the effectiveness of centralized and decentralized programs, including the role of leadership, to improve teacher performance and learning outcomes in East Africa, as well as how electoral incentives shape the design and implementation of education and health policies in Tanzania and India. He is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and has served on an Independent Technical Review Panel for the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). He is a founding member and former co-Director of Georgetown University’s Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation (gui2de) and an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

Dr. James Cust is an Economist working in the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region at the World Bank. Here he is co-leading a new flagship study on Africa’s Resource Future, examining the potential for natural resource wealth to drive Africa’s economic transformation under pressure from climate change, demographic trends and digitization. He also manages the Think Africa Partnership, a regional initiative which seeks to elevate the quality of economic debate and decision-making in Africa by supporting key participants in that process, namely: chief government economic advisors, think tanks and scholars. As part of this work the team has established a peer-learning network of presidential economic advisors across 30 African countries. Prior to his current position, Dr. Cust was Director of Research and Data at the Natural Resource Governance Institute and the founding staff member of the Natural Resource Charter. Both of these initiatives sought to support better outcomes for lower income countries from exploitation of their natural wealth. This involved working directly with governments, academics, and civil society organizations to promote better policy-making and better public debate around the choices countries face when facing resource dependence.

Dr. Cust’s research examines the role of government and governance in harnessing natural resources for growth and poverty reduction, in the context of climate pressures. This work covers the choices countries face around wealth in both renewables (especially forests) and non-renewables (oil, gas and minerals). His work addresses policy-relevant empirical questions, utilizing large-scale spatial data and causal identification. He has recently completed work on the ”Presource Curse” – where some countries are shown to experience expectation booms and growth disappointments even before production begins, on ”Institutions and the location of oil exploration” examining how much weak governance can deter investment in lower income countries, and on “Stranded Nations” examining challenges faced by fossil-fuel rich nations in the face of global decarbonization. He has also completed studies on the local impacts of resource wealth, deforestation dynamics, and Dutch disease. Dr. Cust holds a DPhil (PhD) in Economics from the University of Oxford, an MSc with distinction from Oxford, and a first-class BA Hons from Cambridge. He is an external Research Associate of the Oxford Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (OxCarre) at the Department of Economics in Oxford. You can find his research online at: www.jamescust.com and he tweets at @jimcust.

Dr. Johannes Haushofer was an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and will start as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stockholm University this year (2021). He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Founder and Scientific Director of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, a research non-profit in Nairobi, Kenya. His research interests lie at the intersection of psychology, behavioral economics, and development economics. His research asks whether poverty has particular psychological consequences, and whether these consequences, in turn, affect economic behavior. He holds a BA in Psychology, Physiology and Philosophy from Oxford, a PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard, a PhD in Economics from Zurich, and was most recently a Prize Fellow in Economics at Harvard and the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT.

Dr. John Friedman is a Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University and a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University. His research harnesses the power of large administrative datasets to yield policy-relevant insights on intergenerational mobility in a wide range of settings, including education, neighborhoods, and taxation. His work has appeared in top academic journals as well as in major media outlets, and his findings have been used by policy makers in a wide range of contexts, including President Obama in his 2012 State of the Union Address. Most recently, he has developed the Opportunity Insights Economic Tracker, which provides a real-time look at how COVID-19 is affecting different cities and sectors of the economy. Friedman has worked as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the National Economic Council in the White House from 2013-2014. He holds a Ph.D. in economics, an AM in statistics, and a BA in economics, all from Harvard University. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Public Economics.

Dr. Kate Vyborny is the Associate Director of DevLab@Duke and Research Associate in the Department of Economics at Duke University. She completed her D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, where she was affiliated with the Centre for the Study of African Economies. She is also a visiting faculty member at the Lahore School of Economics and at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, and a Fellow of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan and the Consortium for Development Policy Research in Pakistan. Previously, she worked on research and policy outreach on foreign aid, trade and development at the Center for Global Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. Her research interests include labor markets, urban development and public transportation, and micro evidence on the effectiveness of policies to improve institutional performance. There is a focus on gender issues across most of her work.

Dr. Kehinde Ajayi is an Economist in the World Bank’s Africa Gender Innovation Lab, where she leads research initiatives on women’s economic empowerment, youth employment, and social protection. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University, a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Fulbright Fellow. Kehinde holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Economics from Stanford University

Dr. Laura Schechter is a Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics, and Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is co-editor at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and associate editor at the Economic Journal. In 2019 Laura finished a three-year term as associate editor at the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Her work has been covered by NPR’s Planet Money and has been funded by the NSF, IFPRI, PEDL, and ATAI among others. Her work has been published in top general interest economics journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Economic Journal, as well as in top agricultural economics journals such as American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, and in top development economics journals such as Journal of Development Economics. Laura has also won graduate teaching awards, undergraduate teaching awards, and mentoring awards. Laura’s work uses experimental methods and causal econometric analysis to study topics related to risk and insurance, reciprocity and trust, vote-buying, sanitation, and technology adoption

Dr. Leonard Wantchekon is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, as well as Associated Faculty in Economics. A scholar with diverse interests, Dr. Wantchekon has made substantive and methodological contributions to the fields of political economy, economic history and development economics, and has also contributed significantly to the literatures on clientelism and state capture, resource curse and democratization. He has implemented pioneering studies on political institutions and governance, using field experiments with real politicians competing in real elections to investigate the effects of broad-based policy messages and deliberative campaign strategies on voting behavior and election outcomes. His current work along these lines applies the methodology of institutional experiments to study candidate selection in local elections, bureaucratic governance and the politics of education policies. Professor Wantchekon’s academic initiatives and research projects have been covered by major international media outlets such as Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Jeune Afrique, BBC, Voice of America and Radio France International, among others. His scholarship is shaped in part by his experiences as a left-wing pro-democracy student activist under a repressive military regime in his native country of Benin from 1976 to 1987. He reflects on this experience in his autobiography Rêver-a-Contre Courant (Dreaming Against the Current, Harmattan, 2012), which was reviewed by Professor Nicolas Van De Walle for Foreign Affairs in 2013. Professor Wantchekon is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association. He has also served as Secretary of the American Political Science Association and on the Executive Committee of the Afrobarometer Network. Professor Wantchekon is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics, which opened in Benin in 2014. He previously served as professor at New York University and at Yale University, and holds a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. For his full profile, please visit the IMF website for a Finance & Development article entitled “Ground Breaker.”

Dr. Martin Gaynor is the E.J. Barone University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University and former Director of the Bureau of Economics at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. He is one of the founders of the Health Care Cost Institute, an independent non-partisan nonprofit dedicated to advancing knowledge about U.S. health care spending, and served as the first Chair of its governing board. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and of the National Academy of Social Insurance, President of the American Society of Health Economists, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an International Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. Prior to coming to Carnegie Mellon, Dr. Gaynor held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins and a number of other universities. He has been an invited visitor at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Northwestern University, and the Toulouse School of Economics. His research focuses on competition and antitrust policy, both specifically in health care markets, and more generally. He has written extensively on this topic, testified before Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and advised the governments of the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and South Africa on competition issues. Gaynor is on the Pennsylvania Governor’s Health Advisory Board and co-chaired the state’s workgroup on shoppable care. He has won a number of awards for his research, including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy Best Paper Award, the Victor R. Fuchs Research Award, the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation Health Care Research Award, the Kenneth J. Arrow Award, the Jerry S. Cohen Award for Antitrust Scholarship (finalist), and a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. Dr. Gaynor received his B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1983.

Dr. Mina Kim is a Research Economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where she supports the Office of Compensation and Working Conditions program. Previously she supported the Office of Prices and Living Conditions program. She is also a board member of the National Economic Education Delegation, which seeks to engage Ph.D. economists in helping to improve economic literacy for all, and a Research Associate at the Globalization Institute of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and her B.A. from Swarthmore College. Her research interests generally center on the effects of globalization on firms. Most recently she has been looking at the impact of import competition on the organization of firms. Other research interests include automation and the changing nature of work. Given her position, she has extensive experience working with both administrative data and “big” data.

Dr. Nathan Nunn is the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His primary research interests are in political economy, economic history, economic development, cultural economics, and international trade. He is a National Bureau of Economic Research Faculty Research Fellow, a Research Fellow at BREAD, a Faculty Associate at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA), and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Boundaries, Membership & Belonging program. One stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the historical and dynamic process of economic development. In particular, he has studied the factors that shape differences in the evolution of institutions and cultures across societies. He has also published research that studies the historical process of a wide range of factors that are crucial for economic development, including distrust, gender norms, religiosity, norms of rule-following, conflict, immigration, state formation, and support for democracy. Another stream of Professor Nunn’s research examines economic development in a contemporary context. He has published research examining the effects of Fair Trade certification, CIA interventions during the Cold War, foreign aid, school construction, and trade policy. Professor Nunn is particularly interested in the importance of the local context (e.g., social structures, traditions, and cultures) for the effectiveness of development policy and in understanding how policy can be optimally designed given the local environment. Specifically, he has studied the relationship between marriage customs and female education, generalized trust and political turnover, the organization of the extended family (lineage) and conflict, and traditional local political systems and support for democracy. His current research interests lie in better understanding the importance of local culture and context for economic policies, particularly in developing countries.

Dr. Nick Tsivanidis is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and Department of Economics. He is also a Director of the Cities Research Program at the International Growth Centre. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College before joining UC Berkeley. His research centers on connecting theory with empirics that combine new sources of granular data with natural experiments to learn about the process of urbanization in developing countries. His current projects include examining the impact of mass transit in Bogotá on productivity and inequality, impacts of urban renewal in Mumbai on slums and gentrification, using cellphone data to analyze migration dynamics of refugees in Jordan, and studying the efficiency of informal transit networks in Lagos, Nigeria.

Dr. Nishith Prakash joined the University of Connecticut as an Associate Professor of Economics after completing his doctorate at the University of Houston, Texas and working as a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University. He previously held visiting Assistant Professor positions at Ohio University and Dartmouth College and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Yale University, MIT, and Boston University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) based at University College London, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, HiCN Households in Conflict Network, and a Member of Insights on Immigration and Development (INSIDE-SPAIN). He was a Fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at Harvard Kennedy School during 2019-2020. Professor Prakash’s primary research interests include development, political economy, public policy, and economics of education. One line of his work focuses on understanding the effects of affirmative action policies in India on labor market outcomes, child labor, and poverty. His other work has examined topics such as the returns to English-language skills, effects of crime on economic growth, and effect of politician quality on economic outcomes in India. His recent works include interventions to reduce gender gaps in education using large randomized control trials in Zambia and evaluation of various government policies in India. Through his academic pursuits, he has focused on the relationship between government policies and economic development and harnessed rigorous empirical evidence to study the impact of policies and institutions in enabling inclusive growth. He has experience in conducting surveys, running large-scale randomized control trials in developing countries and working with large-scale observational and administrative data sets. Professor Prakash’s research has been published in top economics journals, including the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and Journal of Development Economics. His works have also been published in interdisciplinary journals including World Development, Feminist Economics, and Journal of Human Rights. Professor Prakash’s research has been covered in The Economist, World Bank Development Impact Blog, World Economic Forum, The Atlantic, The Hindu, The Times of India, The Financial Time, The Statesman, The Economic Times and other national and international newspapers.

Dr. Owen Ozier is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Williams College. He is on leave from the World Bank, where he is a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group, Human Development Team. He received his M.Eng. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2010. Dr. Ozier’s work has been covered by The Economist and on National Public Radio and his peer-reviewed research has been published in the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, and other economics journals. He has also published recent work in leading child development journals, including Developmental Science and Early Childhood Research Quarterly. His published and current research projects include studies in Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda. His work focuses on health, education, and economic decisions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Yale School of Management. His research interests include household finance, corporate finance, econometrics, and social networks. His current work focuses on three strands of research: 1) consumer debt, bankruptcy and housing, and how these interact with issues of discrimination and government policy; 2) econometrics research focused on clarifying existing tools for causal inference; and 3) Covid-19 research related to quarantines and the spread of the virus, and how to nudge/inform populations re: the virus. Before joining Yale in 2018, Dr. Goldsmith-Pinkham was a Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Swarthmore College in 2007, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2015. Dr. Goldsmith-Pinkham is married with one 10-month old son (born right before the pandemic) and has become an avid tennis player since moving to New Haven (starting from scratch!). In a prior life, he was a very serious ultimate frisbee player.

Dr. Priya Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests lie in development economics, with a focus on political economy, education, and health in South and Southeast Asia. She holds a PhD from Cornell University, and completed her Masters and Bachelor’s degrees at the London School of Economics and Delhi University, respectively.

Dr. Rajeev Darolia holds the Wendell H. Ford Professorship of Public Policy (as of January 2021) and is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Kentucky. He also serves as the Associate Director of Martin School of Public Policy, and as the Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD and Master of Public Administration programs. Dr. Darolia is a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a Research Affiliate at the U.K. Center for Poverty Research, and a 2018 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. He serves as an Associate Editor for Education Finance & Policy, is past Associate Editor of the Review of Higher Education, and is on the editorial boards of the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Higher Education, and Educational Researcher. His research relates to questions on how public policy affects economic mobility and financial security, with a primary focus on education policy and the economics of education.

Dr. Renard Sexton is a Political Scientist who studies conflict and development, especially in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Latin America. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University. His scholarly work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science and Journal of Politics. He also does policy work and commentary, which has been published by the Washington Post, New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy, as well as by the International Crisis Group and the United Nations.

Dr. Robert Garlick is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Duke University and an affiliate at J-PAL. He studies education and labor markets in developing economies. His current research focuses mainly on two areas: frictions in urban labor markets that distort job search and hiring decisions, and the determinants of, and returns to, human capital investment decisions. Dr. Garlick holds a PhD in economics and public policy from the University of Michigan and previously studied at the University of Cape Town.

Dr. Rocco Macchiavello was born and grew up in Rapallo, Italy, a relatively small town on the Ligurian Riviera. He studied at the local University of Genoa, before getting his Master in Economics in Paris at the EHESS and then moving on to the London School of Economics and Political Science, for his PhD. Rocco is now back at the LSE as an Associate Professor in Management, after having been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Professor at Warwick University. Rocco's research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, organizational economics and industrial organization and are primarily concerned with understanding the institutional determinants of, and constraints to, firm performance and industrial development. Dr. Macchiavello has conducted field work in several countries, including Bangladesh, Kenya, India, Myanmar and Rwanda. He is currently working on several research projects, many in the coffee sector in producing countries. He is married and has two kids.

Dr. Sandile Hlatshwayo is an Economist in the Macro-Risk Unit at the International Monetary Fund where she evaluates risks across the Fund’s 189 member countries through crisis prediction modeling, text-based analytics, and strategic foresight activities (e.g. wargaming). Her primary research interest is quantifying the domestic and international consequences of policy uncertainty through the use of machine-learning and natural language processing techniques. Her work has been featured in The Economist, The New York Times, Financial Times, and The Washington Post. She also conducts work on Madagascar and has previously worked on South Africa and Fiji. Outside of her professional obligations, she mentors and advises universities on pipeline programs, sits on the board of Black Professionals in International Affairs, and serves as an inaugural member of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked in the private sector at Procter & Gamble in South Africa. Dr. Hlatshwayo holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, a master’s in policy studies from Stanford University, and a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Political Science from Spelman College

Dr. Sandra Sequeira is an Associate Professor in Development Economics at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on development economics and political economy. Her current research covers topics on labor markets, immigration and forced displacement in the developing world. In particular, she holds a Starting Grant from the European Research Council to study the economics of forced displacement in Sub-Saharan Africa, which has led her to run several projects in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Dr. Sequeira also has an active line of research on the political economy of consumer behavior, implementing experimental work with large retailers in the US and in the UK. She is also conducting fieldwork in several countries and regions ranging from the US and the U.K., to Southern and Eastern Africa. She is an affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Lead Academic for Mozambique at the International Growth Centre.

Dr. Sarah Jacobson is an Associate Professor of Economics at Williams College. She completed her PhD in Economics at Georgia State University and her Bachelor of Science in Engineering at Harvey Mudd College. She is an environmental and behavioral economist who studies environmental regulations and interactions between preferences and institutions, using laboratory experiments, applied theory, and observational data. Themes in Dr. Jacobson’s research include regulatory incentive structures, punishment, deterrence, charity donations, reciprocity, rationality errors, and situations in which social preferences yield inefficient outcomes. She also designs games for teaching topics in environmental economics. Dr. Jacobson engages extensively with efforts to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity in the economics profession through initiatives within Williams, the mentoring programs of the American Economic Association, and the Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA). She also does some writing and speaking on inclusion and on professional development.

Dr. Sebastian Tello-Trillo is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His fields of specialization are Health Economics and Applied Microeconomics. Dr. Tello-Trillo has an interest in the area of health policy in the U.S and Latin America. For 2019-2020 he was a Scholar-in-Residence through the Institute for Research Poverty at University of Wisconsin-Madison and visited the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis. He also co-edits the American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon) Newsletter and enjoys participating in different mentoring programs such as the Research in Color Foundation. With Aparna Soni and Jevay Grooms, he founded the DMV Health Econ Workshop day, which is scheduled to have its first iteration in Fall 2021. With Alex Hollingsworth, he is the co-host of the podcast "The Hidden Curriculum", which covers topics of productivity in the economics profession.

Dr. Simon Firestone is a Principal Economist at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. He has been at the Board for eleven years. He started out in Consumer and Community Affairs, working on enforcing Fair Lending regulations in mortgage markets. He switched to Supervision and Regulation, where he worked for years on Basel capital requirements and stress tests in both business and consumer credit markets. About three years ago, he switched to working on evaluation of policy effectiveness in banking regulation. Economics is a second career for Dr. Firestone; he started his professional life as an urban planner, working in New York City government in various roles. Aside from his career, he likes studying rabbinic texts and is a proud dog dad to Biscuit, a terrier mix.

Dr. Subha Mani is an Associate Professor of Economics and a Research Associate at the Center for International Policy Studies at Fordham University. Subha also holds a Research Affiliate position at the Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania as well as Research Fellow positions at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA) and Global Labor Organization (GLO). She has her BA (honors) degree in economics from Delhi University, Master’s degree in economics from Mumbai University, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Southern California. Her areas of specialization are development economics, labor economics, health, education, program evaluation, field experiments, applied econometrics, and applied microeconomics. Dr. Mani’s main area of interest lies in understanding the causes and pathways through which human capital (health, education, vocational training, language training) can be accumulated for young children and adults, and has examined these issues specifically using large-scale panel data sets from Indonesia, India, Ethiopia, Peru, and Vietnam. She has also worked on numerous experimental and non-experimental evaluation studies and has undertaken extensive primary data collection, fieldwork, and management in India, Sierra Leone and Azerbaijan. Her scholarly work has received external funding from the International Growth Center – India Central, 3ie (International Initiatives for Impact Evaluation), and Grand Challenges Canada. Her scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Development Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, World Development (4x), Journal of Nutrition, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Development Studies, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Labour Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology (2x), Journal of African Economies, and several others.

Dr. Tavneet Suri is the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics and an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her expertise is in the role of technology in Sub-Saharan Africa. Dr. Suri is Editor-in-Chief of VoxDev; Scientific Director for Africa for J-PAL; Co-Chair of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative at J-PAL; Chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa; and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She holds a BA in economics from Cambridge University, U.K., and an MA in International and Development Economics (IDE) and a PhD in economics, both from Yale University

Dr. Tristan Reed is an Economist in the Research Group of the World Bank. His fields are industrial organization and development, and he is interested, broadly, in how markets work. Alongside research, Dr. Reed has contributed economic analyses to infrastructure lending operations and government advisory in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Prior to joining the Bank, he worked as a management consultant with McKinsey & Company in the Lagos, Nigeria office, where he served clients in government and in the financial sector. Dr. Reed was born in California and holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. in economics with a minor in mathematics summa cum laude from UCLA. His fields of expertise are in industrial organization, trade, microeconomic analysis of economic development. Dr. Reed speaks English, French, and Spanish. More information can be found on his website here.