Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Reducing Global Poverty Stanford University Bechtel Conference Center Encina Hall Friday, May 9th, 2008 Open to all Stanford students and the Stanford community by invitation. Please RSVP. |
| Policy Forum Speaker Bios |
Abimbola Dairo Having lived the first eight years of her life in sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, Abimbola witnessed the challenges that most people in the developing world face. As a result of this early exposure, she began to consider ways to combine her interest in biology with public service. Along with pursuing her personal goals, she determined that she would live a life that positively impacted those in the developing world. For example, while she pursued her growing interest in science doing research in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology departments at City College of New York, she helped to organize a student-run annual conference for 800 youth from all over world in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Upon arriving at Stanford University, she did not forget her desire to impact the lives of those in the developing world through health. However, she quickly learnt that in the developing world, health is only a symptom of a greater issue - poverty. She currently serves as a member of the executive board of Stanford Africa Business Forum, a group that organizes a conference for students, faculty, business leaders, and policy makers to discuss and discover opportunities for collaborative solutions to the continent's challenges. Her future plans include getting involved in more multi-lateral efforts to transform the lives of those in the developing world. Jane Chen . William Easterly William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC and Visiting Fellow at Brookings during the academic year 2007-2008. William Easterly received his Ph.D. in Economics at MIT. He spent sixteen years as a Research Economist at the World Bank. He is the author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), 3 other co-edited books, and 56 articles in refereed economics journals. His work has been discussed in media outlets like the Lehrer Newshour, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor. Easterly's areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. Easterly is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics. He was born in West Virginia and is the 8th most famous native of Bowling Green, Ohio, where he grew up. Kjerstin Erickson Kjerstin Erickson is the founder and Executive Director of FORGE, an international non-profit organization that works to end the cycle of war and poverty in Africa by educating, empowering, and enriching the lives of African refugees. Following her third trip to the African continent, Kjerstin created FORGE in 2003 when she was a 20-year-old junior at Stanford University. Now 24, Kjerstin continues to manage the day to day operations of the organization and to oversee FORGE's growth and development. In order to focus on her work with FORGE, Kjerstin has put off the completion of her undergraduate degree in Public Policy. Since 2003, FORGE has been an official operating partner of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), and has worked with local governments in Zambia and Botswana to bring FORGE's work to four different refugee camps in Southern Africa. As Executive Director, Kjerstin oversees FORGE's effectiveness, strategic direction, fiscal efficiency, and public presence. After traveling in 40+ countries across the globe and making 14 trips to Africa, Kjerstin is convinced of the urgent need for non-profit organizations to focus on providing opportunities to world's most motivated and inspired individuals – people who have been born into extreme poverty but who refuse to let it stop them from forging ahead in their lives. Kjerstin hopes to continue to expand the FORGE movement to reach communities across the African continent. Paul J. Gertler David Grusky David B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, Director of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, and coeditor (with Paula England) of the Stanford University Press Social Inequality Series. He received his B.A. at Reed College, his M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has held positions at the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, recipient of the 2004 Max Weber Award, founder of the Cornell University Center for the Study of Inequality, and a former Presidential Young Investigator. His research addresses issues of inequality and takes on such questions as whether and why gender, racial, and class-based inequalities are growing stronger, why they differ in strength across countries, and how such changes and differences are best measured. Hilary Hoynes Hilary Hoynes is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis and the co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Hoynes specializes in the study of tax and transfer programs for poor families. Her work looks at the effects of various tax and transfer programs on labor supply, family formation, poverty and inequality. She has written numerous papers about impacts of the U.S. cash welfare program (formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), now Temporary Assistance for Needy Families). She is also an expert on the effects of the Earned Income Tax Credit and made a presentation on the EITC to President Bush's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform. This work has been published in many prestigious journals such as the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Public Economics. She has research affiliations at the National Bureau of Economic, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, the National Poverty Center and the Institute for Research on Poverty. She has received research grants from the National Institute on Aging; the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development; the US Department of Agriculture; the Institute for Research on Poverty; and the Joint Center for Poverty Research. Professor Hoynes received her PhD from Stanford University in 1992. David Klaus David Klaus is a Design Fellow at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (dschool.stanford.edu). He co-teaches Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability (extreme.stanford.edu), a multidisciplinary, graduate-level project course where students design and implement solutions to problems facing the world's poor. Past projects have included irrigation pumps, water storage devices, off-grid lights, medical devices, education tools, and many others. David has also worked in Africa and Asia on water and irrigation projects. He has worked on the design of two different human-powered irrigation pumps and spent a summer in Asia transitioning the prototypes into full-scale production. The pumps are now the most popular line of treadle pumps in Myanmar/Burma, and are beginning to be exported to other countries around the world. Anjini Kochar Anjini Kochar is both a senior research scholar and India Program director at the Stanford Center for International Development (SCID). Prior to her position at SCID, she was an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University. Kochar has a Ph.D. in Economics and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College. Her research interests include the microeconomics of development, poverty, education and health issues in developing economies. Johannes F. Linn Mr. Linn received his training as an economist at Oxford University, England (BA, 1968), and at Cornell University, USA (PhD, 1972). He joined the World Bank in 1973. For nine years he did research on urban development and published two books: Cities in the Developing World (1983) and Urban Public Finance (1992; with Roy W. Bahl). Subsequently he was country economist and economic advisor in the Bank’s East Asia Region. In 1987/88, Mr. Linn was Staff Director of World Development Report 1988, and then served in various managerial functions in the Bank’s research department. In 1991, Mr. Linn became the Bank’s Vice President for Financial Policy and Resource Mobilization. From 1996 to 2003, Mr. Linn was the Bank’s Vice President for Europe and Central Asia. Since September 2003 he is at the Brookings Institution, where he is currently Executive Director of the Wolfensohn Center, a new center dedicated to research on key development challenges. During 2004-5 Mr. Linn also served as Project Leader and Lead Author for the UNDP Central Asia Human Development Report which was published in December 2005. Mr. Linn has published extensively on development and global governance issues, including a book jointly edited with Colin Bradford on Global Governance Reform: Breaking the Stalemate (Brookings Press 2007). Courtney McColgan Courtney McColgan is Co-founder and Director of US Operations for Wokai - a non-profit dedicated to China Microfinance. Courtney graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a BA in Economics and Chinese. During her time at Berkeley, Courtney spent over two years in China completing extensive language study at Tsinghua University as well as conducting microfinance research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While in Beijing, she worked with such organizations as Planet Finance and the United Nations Development Program. After graduation, Courtney obtained a Fulbright grant to return to China and continue her microfinance research. Courtney currently works for Morgan Stanley as a financial analyst in the investment-banking field. Naganand Murty James M. Patell James Patell is the Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Professor Patell earned Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught at Stanford since 1975, and he was a Ford Foundation Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Chicago from 1981-1982. Professor Patell served as the Business School’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 1985 through 1991, and was Director of Stanford's MBA Program from 1986 through 1988. He was the founding director of the Stanford-ITESM Strategic Executive Program in Mexico, and now serves as Codirector of the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford (AIM), a cooperative research and educational program involving the Business School and the Engineering School at Stanford, together with approximately 12 industrial firms. Before entering the Dean’s office, Professor Patell's research centered on empirical investigations of the effects of corporate disclosures on the stock and option markets. More recently, he has conducted research and taught courses on manufacturing, technology, and operations management, including new courses on Computer Modeling, Total Quality Management, Manufacturing Performance Measurement, and Business Process Design. In 1998, he received the MBA Distinguished Teaching Award. Professor Patell is one of the seven founding core faculty of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d-School). Within the d-School, Professor Patell co-teaches Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability with Professors David Beach and David Kelley. In this course, student teams collaboratively design product prototypes, distribution systems, and business plans for entrepreneurial ventures that address poverty in developing countries. Professor Patell has served as a Director of Reliant Building Products, Inc., of Grove Worldwide, and of the Center for the Quality of Management-West, and he serves as an advisor to the Corporate Design Foundation and to Vykor, Inc. He was a founding Director of Ignite Innovations and of the Management Institute for Environment and Business. Scott Rozelle Dr. Rozelle's research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with three general themes: a) agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; b) the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and c) the economics of poverty and inequality. In the past several years, Dr. Rozelle's papers have been published in top academic journals, including Science, Nature, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Literature. He is fluent in Chinese and has established a research program in which he has close working ties with several Chinese collaborators and policymakers. He is the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy; a co-director of the Agricultural Issues Center (University of California); and a member of Stanford's new Food, Security, and the Environment Program. Jeffrey D. Sachs Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty. He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change. In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and the New York Times bestseller The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University. |
