Gustavo Angeles is a health economist, professor at the University of North Carolina and fellow at the Carolina Population Center. His research interest is in the impact of development programs on household’s demographic, health, and economic outcomes. His work focuses on applied evaluations of ongoing programs in developing countries as well as on methodological and measurement problems for estimating program impacts correctly. Professor Angeles is currently examining the impact of cash transfer programs on poverty, human capital, and productive outcomes in Malawi, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia which is part of the Transfer Project. Find more about Dr. Angeles here: https://publicpolicy.unc.edu/person/angeles-gustavo/

Franziska Gassmann (PhD in Economics) is Professor of Social Protection and Development at Maastricht University. She is also the Head of the UNU-MERIT Graduate School. The focus of her current research is on understanding to what extent and under what conditions formal and informal social protection contribute to inclusive development. Find more about Dr. Gassman here: https://www.merit.unu.edu/about-us/profile/?staff_id=1314

Sonam Gupta, Managing Economist and Program Area Lead at AIR, has more than 18 years of experience in research, evaluation, management, design, and implementation of complex, multi-country international development projects. Dr. Gupta oversees a portfolio of technical assistance projects in the LAC region and has worked on evaluation and technical assistance projects in 20 countries. The key focus of her technical assistance projects is on labor justice reform, labor law enforcement, supporting worker efforts to exercise their right to organize and bargain collectively and use of data for effective decision making. Find more about Dr. Gupta here: https://www.air.org/experts/person/sonam-gupta

Sudhanshu (Ashu) Handa is Institute Fellow in the International Development Division at AIR based in Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Handa is an economist working on poverty, health, and human development in LMICs. He is the co-principal investigator of The Transfer Project, which seeks to understand the broad effects of government-sponsored cash transfer programs in sub-Saharan Africa, a joint initiative wwith UNICEF and FAO, and also studies the long-term effects of cash transfers in Zambia and Malawi. Find more about Dr. Handa here: https://www.air.org/experts/person/sudhanshu-ashu-handa   

Melissa is a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI) Unit of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She is an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of gender, agriculture, and social protection. Her gender research focuses on how different interventions, including cash transfers and edutainment, affect intrahousehold dynamics, and how intrahousehold dynamics affect agriculture production. Her current works involves impact evaluations of nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, social protection, and edutainment in Mali, Ghana, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Senegal. Melissa holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley. Find more about Dr. Hidrobo here: https://www.ifpri.org/profile/melissa-hidrobo 

Jacobus de Hoop is a senior economist in the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice. At the World Bank, Jacob currently leads the Gender Innovation Lab for Latin America and the Caribbean and supports the organization’s program in Costa Rica and Suriname. Before joining the World Bank, Jacob worked as a humanitarian policy research manager at UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, was a member of the Transfer Project, worked as a researcher at the International Labour Organization (ILO), and was affiliated with the Paris School of Economics as a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow. He holds a PhD in economics from the Tinbergen Institute and VU University in Amsterdam. Find more about Dr. Jacobus De Hoop here: Jacobus de Hoop | Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Global Poverty and Equity Practice 

Damien King is the Executive Director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI), a public policy think tank, Executive Chairman of Recycling Partners of Jamaica, a plastic recycling non-profit, and formerly a lecturer in Economics at the University of the West Indies. He has written, supervised, and published academic work and policy papers in the areas of sovereign debt, economic modeling, international trade, fiscal analysis, and financial inclusion, amongst others. Damien is the author and editor (with David Tennant) of Debt and Development in Small Island Developing States, (Palgrave, New York). He earned his B.A. from York University, Canada, an M.Sc. from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and a Ph.D. from New York University, USA. Damien serves on corporate boards in both the public and private sectors.

Tia Palermo is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo and President of Policy Research Solutions (PRESTO). Her research examines impacts of social protection on well-being and health. At PRESTO, she leads projects translating evidence to facilitate its uptake in policy and programming. She was formerly a Social Policy Manager at UNICEF and an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University. She has served as co-Principal Investigator on five studies for  The Transfer Project and is a member of The Cash Transfer and Intimate Partner Violence Research Collaborative. She holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy.

Agnes Quisumbing is a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).  Her research interests include poverty, gender, property rights, and economic mobility. More recently she has been involved in developing metrics for women’s empowerment for impact evaluations of agricultural development projects and for national statistical systems.  Find more about Dr. Quisumbing here: https://www.ifpri.org/profile/agnes-quisumbing

David Seidenfeld is a senior vice president and leads AIR's International Development Division, overseeing a portfolio of more than 50 active research, evaluation, and technical assistance projects in low- and middle-income countries around the globe. Dr. Seidenfeld has extensive experience designing and implementing evaluations of economic, health, and education programs. His own research focuses primarily on social protection and cash transfer programs, child nutrition, and refugee populations. Dr. Seidenfeld co-founded and supports the Impact Network, an independent non-profit that brings eLearning and wrap-around services to 45 rural schools in Zambia as well as girls support programs and children’s health programs.Find more about Dr. Seidenfield here: https://www.air.org/experts/person/david-seidenfeld

Precious Zikhali is a Senior Economist with the Poverty & Equity Global Practice of the World Bank, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Before moving to Nairobi, she was based in Pretoria, South Africa, working on the Bank’s Southern Africa poverty and equity program. Prior to joining the Bank, Precious worked in both the public sector and international development space, having worked as a Director at the National Treasury of South Africa’s Economic Policy Division, researcher at the Centre for World Food Studies in Amsterdam as well as researcher at the International Water Management Institute in Pretoria. She has also worked as a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Economics, University of Zimbabwe.  Her current research and policy work includes statistical capacity building around poverty and inequality measurement, analysis of constraints and drivers of poverty and inequality reduction, assessment of the poverty and distributional impacts of policies and interventions, all with the aim of supporting evidence-based policy making. Precious holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Find more about Dr. Zikhali here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/precious-zikhali-02876b62/?originalSubdomain=ke