Apolitical's 100 Most Influential Academics in Government

Adam was born in London. He grew up between England and Heidelberg,Germany. Having received his BA in Economics from King’s College Cambridge in the summer of 1989, he had the good fortune to witness the end of the Cold War in Berlin, where he began his postgraduate studies. He went on to take his PhD from the London School of Economics. From 1996 to 2009 Adam taught at the University of Cambridge, where he was Reader in Modern History and Gurnee Hart fellow in History at Jesus College. After Cambridge, Adam was appointed to the Barton M. Biggs Professorship at Yale University, where he succeeded Paul Kennedy as the Director of International Security Studies. Adam joined Columbia’s history department in the summer of 2015.
-Adam’s first book, "Statistics and the German State: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge" appeared in 2001. "Wages of Destruction: the Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy" was published in 2006 and "Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931" in 2014.
-For these books Adam won the Leverhulme prize fellowship, the H-Soz-Kult Historisches Buch Prize, the Longman History Today Prize, the Wolfson Prize and the LA Times History Prize. He was shortlisted for the Kirkus review, Duff Cooper and Hessel Tiltman prize and his books have featured in the book of the year lists of the Financial Times, LA Times, Kirkus Review, Foreign Affairs and the Economist. His most recent book is titled: "Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy".

(Bio Credit: https://adamtooze.com/bio/) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Professor Agnes Binagwaho, MD, M(Ped), PHD currently resides in Rwanda and is the Vice Chancellor and co-founder of the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) (in 2015), an initiative of Partners in Health which focuses on changing how health care is delivered around the world by training global health professionals who strive to deliver more equitable, quality health services for all.

She is a Rwandan pediatrician who returned to Rwanda in 1996, two years after the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi. Since then, (1996-2016), she has provided clinical care in the public sector and served the Rwandan Health Sector in high-level government positions, first as the Executive Secretary of Rwanda's National AIDS Control Commission, then as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health, and lastly as the Minister of Health for 5 years.

Professor Binagwaho specializes in emergency pediatrics, neonatology, and the treatment of HIV/AIDS. She completed her MD at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and her MA in Pediatrics at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. She was also awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science from Dartmouth College and earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Rwanda College of Medicine.

She currently serves as a member of several advisory boards and groups among them the Africa CDC Strategic Advisory Group of Experts and the Wellcome Global Monitor. She also serves as a member of various boards of directors including the Rockefeller Foundation Board of Trustees and the Consortium of University for Global Health. She currently also serves on the African Union Commission on COVID-19 Response under the leadership of HE President Ramaphosa of South Africa. She is a member of a number of international scientific committees, working groups and task forces in global health for different institutions such as the Think 20 (T20) and the United Nations as well as for independent organizations such as the Africa Europe Foundation. Prof. Binagwaho also sits on the editorial board of several scientific journals such as the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

Previously, she co-chaired the Millennium Development Goal Project Task Force on HIV/AIDS and Access to Essential Medicines for the Secretary-General of the United Nations under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Sachs (MGGs, 2001-2006). Professor Binagwaho also co-chaired the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS (JLICA) (2006–09) and founded the Rwandan Pediatric Society, chairing it until 2019. Since 2016, she has been a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, since 2017 a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences, and a member of the World Academy of Sciences since 2021. In 2015, Professor Binagwaho received the annual Roux Prize and Ronald McDonald House Charities Award of Excellence. She was also named among the 100 Most Influential African Women for 2020 and 2021.

Professor Binagwaho is currently a Professor of Pediatrics at UGHE, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. Her academic engagements include research in implementation science, human rights to health, social justice, health services delivery, health systems strengthening, HIV/AIDS, non-communicable diseases and pediatric care. She has published over 220 peer- reviewed articles.

Ajay Shah is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine and the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Professor of Cardiology; James Black Professor of Medicine; Director of the King's BHF Centre of Research Excellence; and Hon. Consultant Cardiologist at King's College Hospital. He trained in medicine and cardiology at the University of Wales, undertook doctoral research training in Wales and Belgium, and was a postdoctoral scientist at the National Institutes of Health in the USA in the early 1990s. Prior to his appointment to the Chair of Cardiology at King's in 1998, he was a Medical Research Council Senior Clinical Fellow in Cardiff.
-The main research interests of the Shah lab are in the pathophysiology of heart failure, both in experimental models and in patients. His group has undertaken seminal studies on the role of NADPH oxidase (NOX) proteins and redox signalling pathways in the cardiovascular system. He has a long-standing interest in the actions of NO in the heart and has recently developed a programme of human studies on the roles of neuronal NO synthase (nNOS).Other areas of work include heart failure with preserved ejection function (HFpEF) and heterogeneity in heart failure. He has published ~ 350 peer-reviewed papers and has an h-index of 98. Ajay is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, the International Society for Heart Research, the European Society of Cardiology, and the American Heart Association.
-He is Associate Editor of the American Journal of Physiology (Heart & Circulation), Consulting Editor for Cardiovascular Research, and on the Editorial Boards of Circulation and the European Heart Journal.

(Bio Credit: KCL People's Directory) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Dr. Iwasaki is the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. Akiko Iwasaki is interested in how immunity is initiated and maintained at mucosal surfaces – natural ports of entry for pathogens. Iwasaki and her team focus on understanding how viruses are recognized (innate immunity) and how that information is used to generate protective adaptive immunity. They study immune responses to herpes simplex viruses in the genital tract and influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2 in the lung. The team also investigates the role of endogenous retroviruses and transposable elements in host immunity and physiology. Ultimately, their goal is to improve rational design of effective therapeutics and vaccines to prevent transmission of viral pathogens.

(Bio Credit: Yale University People Directory) (Image Credit: Yale School of Medicine)

Anup Malani is the Lee and Brena Freeman Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, a Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston.

• He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He conducts research in development economics, health economics and law and economics. During the COVID pandemic, Malani led a modeling team that developed a forecasting model and method of adaptive control for COVID in India; that model was used to inform policy in Bihar and in Indonesia. Malani was an investigator on population-level viral surveys in Bihar, serological (antibody) surveys in Mumbai, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, and a cellular immunity survey in Bangalore. This work on COVID has won two Emergent Ventures prizes. He worked on vaccine distribution policies for Indonesia and India. He also used a large, panel survey to estimate the number of excess deaths in India during the pandemic and to understand the economic impacts of the pandemic. He is now conducting verbal autopsies on roughly 30,000 to determine the fraction of excess deaths that are attributable to COVID. Finally, Malani has studied how Indian households adapted financially to COVID and the impact of COVID on individual income inequality in India. Prior to the pandemic, Malani’s research focused on development economics. Malani was the principal investigator for the Indian Health Insurance Experiment, an 11,000 household evaluation of India’s first national health insurance program. He conducted ethnographic research in 21 slums across 7 cities for a book and film on the economics of slums in India.
• In the field of health economics, Malani developed new models to value medical innovation and improve clinical research. His recent work in law has focused on improving methods for doctrinal analysis of case law. Malani’s research has been published in journals in several different fields, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Harvard Law Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and Theoretical Population Biology.
• Malani is the co-founder and Faculty Director of the International Innovation Corps, a social service program that sends postgraduates to work on innovative projects with government officials in India and the US. Malani has a J.D. and Ph.D in economics from the University of Chicago. He was a law clerk to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court and the founding Faculty Director of the Tata Centre for Development at the University of Chicago.

(Image Credit: University of Chicago)

Choolwe Jacobs comes from the University of Zambia where she is a lecturer and a researcher in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the School of Public Health. Choolwe is a social epidemiologist and a public health specialist with a nursing background. She completed her PhD in Public Health from the University of Kwa Zulu Natal, in South Africa and her Master in Public Health from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

• Choolwe’s research interest is in maternal, newborn, child health and adolescent health, involving various aspects of “access and rights” particularly for rural, poorest women and vulnerable. Choolwe would like to explore ethical challenges and issues within the broader context of operational and health system research, bringing in ethical dilemmas surrounding the poorest and most vulnerable women and adolescents in Zambia.

(Bio Credit: JHU People Directory) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Christian Happi, is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genomics and Director of the World Bank funded African Center of Excellence for Genomics of infectious Diseases (ACEGID) in Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun State, Nigeria.

• Professor Christian Happi, holds PhD from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria (2000). Professor Happi is currently a visiting Professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases (IID), Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University.
• His research focus is on genomics of infectious diseases (Malaria, Lassa fever, Ebola Virus Disease, HIV) and Human genomics. He diagnosed the first case of Ebola virus disease in Nigeria in 2014 and worked closely with Nigerian health authorities for the successful containment of the recent Ebola outbreak in Nigeria. Professor Christian Happi and colleagues used advanced genomics and deep sequencing technology to sequence the first 99 Ebola virus genomes during the 2014-2016 Wet African Ebola outbreak, and made these openly accessible to the international scientific and research community. Thus, pioneering opened access genomics data.
• In 2007, Professor Happi developed and performed the first onsite molecular diagnosis of Lassa fever in Nigeria, at the Irrua Specialist teaching Hospital (ISTH), Edo State, Nigeria. He has since worked with collaborators to develope a novel 5 minute rapid diagnosis test for Lassa fever, which his research team is currently validating in the field in Nigeria.
• In addition to these major breakthroughs, Professor Happi discovered two new viruses (EKV-1 and EKV-2) in Ekpoma Edo State, using a new cutting-edge technology call microbial metagenomics, in 2015. In 2018, he used the same metagenomics approach to discover a new Yellow fever strain that was responsible for a “mysterious” viral haemorrhagic fever outbreak in Edo State, Nigeria. This information was immediately passed to NCDC, who declared an outbreak and successfully contained it, saving thousands of lives.
• Unprecedentedly, Professor Happi recently used next generation sequencing technology to perform the first sequence of the new SARS-CoV-2 in Africa, within 48 hours of receiving sample of the first index case in Nigeria. This seminal work on Covid-19 genomics has not only provided insight into the detailed genetic map, origins, evolution, transmission and spread of the new coronavirus in Nigeria and Africa, but also paves the way to him developing a new Covid-19 nucleic acid-based rapid (15mins) diagnostics test. His genomics sequencing work has also resulted in the development of a Covid-19 vaccine candidate (Covid-Diovax) in collaboration with the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. This vaccine is currently undergoing clinical trial in the UK.
• Professor Happi has received several prestigious national and International Awards for innovation and Health Leaderships, including: the 2016 Research Innovation Award of the Association of Vice Chancellors of Nigerian Universities for his seminal work of Ebola rapid diagnostics test development; the 2011 Merle Sande Africa Health Leadership Award; the 2019 Human Genome Organization (HUGO) Africa Prize in recognition of his outstanding and extensive contributions in applying genomics knowledge in addressing major infectious diseases challenges in Africa, especially malaria and Lassa fever and Ebola Virus Disease. In 2020, Professor Christian Happi received the prestigious Bailey K. Ashford Medal of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), for lifetime and impactful contribution in infectious diseases and tropical medicine. He is a founding fellow of the Academy of Medicine Specialties of Nigeria.
• Christian Happi is co-author to more than 180 peer-reviewed scientific publications in high impact factor such as Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, Lancet, Genome Biology and many more.
• Professor Christian Happi, embodies the passion, intellectual drive, and innovative spirit that African scientific leaders need for discoveries that will help the continent stem its scientific and academic challenges. His scientific contributions have gained him the admiration and respect of researchers worldwide in global health. He embodies the real and tangible impact African healthcare leaders are having in defining solutions to quell the impact of infectious diseases in Africa, where these diseases take the lives of thousands of children every day.

(Image Credit: ACEGID)

Christina has a background in both mathematics and physics, with an undergraduate degree in maths and a PhD in space physics. After three years as a post-doctoral physicist in Boston, Christina decided to make the transition into operational research applied to health care and joined the UCL Clinical Operational Research Unit (CORU) in late 2005.

• In 2008, Christina was promoted to the position of Senior Research Fellow and began leading CORU's work on global health. In October 2017 Christina became Director of CORU and in October 2018 they were promoted to Professor of Operational Research. From 2013-2019, Christina also spent time as an honorary "researcher in residence" within the critical care units at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has been a member of the Independent Sage Committee.

(Bio Credit: Adapt to Thrive) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Professor Folasade Ogunsola is a former Provost of the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Nigeria and former Deputy chancellor of the University of Lagos. She obtained a Masters in Medical Microbiology from the College of Medicine, University of Lagos followed by a Ph.D. in Medical Microbiology from the College of Medicine, University of Wales, Cardiff. She is a Fellow of Nigerian Post graduate College of Pathologists, Fellow of the West African College of Physicians and Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians UK. She is the first female Provost at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos in its 50 years of existence.

• Professor Ogunsola is the Director of the Centre for Infection Control and Patient Safety (CiCAPS) and Principal Investigator of a several grants including the Forgarty International Centre (NIH) sponsored Building Research and Innovation in Nigeria's Science (BRAINS) to develop research capacity in junior faculty.
• She has been instrumental to setting up infection control programs in a number of institutions in Nigeria and is the Chair of the Infection control Africa Network (ICAN). She is a member of the WHO Global Infection Prevention and Control Network and a member of the WHO Technical Advisory group of experts on Handhygeine.
• She has received a number of awards and recognitions including the Federation of European Microbiological Societies Overseas research Scholarship in 1993, the Keystone Symposia Global Health Travel Award in 2010, Medical Women’s association of Nigeria Distinction in Medicine Award in 2013 and the Distinguished Alumni Lof the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria in May 2017.

(Bio Credit: The Conversation) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Gautam I Menon is a Professor of Physics and Biology as well as Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS) at Ashoka University. He is a Professor (on lien) with the Theoretical Physics and Computational Biology groups at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, where he was the founding Dean of the Computational Biology group. He is currently an adjunct Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.

• He completed a BSc. (Hons) in Physics at St. Stephens College, Delhi, an MSc from IIT Kanpur, and a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Following post-doctoral work at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai and the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, he joined the Institute of Mathematical Sciences' Theoretical Physics Group.
• He was awarded a DST Fast Track Fellowship for Young Scientists and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship of the DST. He was named a DAE-SRC Outstanding Research Investigator and an Outstanding Referee by the American Physical Society. He has been a Visiting Professor at both the Mechanobiology Institute and the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore in the period 2011-2013.
• He serves on scientific review committees of several international agencies, among them the Human Frontier Science Program and the Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance. His research has been funded by the European Union, the Indo-French CEFIPRA, the BMGF, the WHO as well as the DBT, DST and DAE in India. He is an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India.
• He works currently on biophysical problems including nuclear architecture, axonal transport, collective cell migration and cell adhesion. The modeling of infectious disease and its implications for public policy is a long-standing interest. He has written extensively for the general public on the COVID-19 pandemic. Apart from his scientific work, he is interested in making science accessible to the public.

Glenda Gray, MBBCH, FCPaeds (SA), a paediatrician by training, is the executive director of the Perinatal HIV Research Unit and Research Professor based at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa as well as the Director of the Office of AIDS Research at the SA-MRC. She has done research in PMTCT, paediatric HIV, and HIV prevention including HIV vaccines and microbicides. She is the Co-PI of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and Director of HVTN International Programs. In 2002, together with James McIntyre she was awarded the Nelson Mandela Health and Human Rights Award for pioneering work done in the field of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV-1. She is a member of the Academy of Science in South Africa, and chairs their standing committee on health. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine, of the National Academies, and serves on their Global Health Board.

• Gray has also been awarded the IAPAC “Hero of Medicine” award for work done in the field of HIV treatment in children and adults. In 2009, James McIntyre and Gray received the N’Galy-Mann lectureship in recognition of their HIV research contribution in South Africa. In June 2012 she received a DSc honoris causa from the Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. She has also been admitted into the American Academy of Microbiology in 2012. In 2013 she received the country’s highest honour, the Order of Mapungubwe, granted by the president of SA for achievements in the international area which have served South Africa’s interest. Just recently she received the 2013 EDCTP’s Outstanding African Scientist Award.

(Bio Credit: The Conversation) (Image Credit: SAMRC)

Jean-Jacques Muyembe has devoted the last four decades to researching Ebola virus disease. He worked on the World Health Organization (WHO) team that implemented detection and control measures in the first documented urban outbreak of Ebola in Kikwit in 1995 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Muyembe is Director-General of the National Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor of Microbiology at Kinshasa University Medical School in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He worked at the Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal in 1981 and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981 in the Special Pathogens Branch for the study of Ebola and Marburg viruses and has chaired several international committees for the control of Ebola outbreaks. He was appointed dean of the Faculty of Kinshasa University Medical school in 1978, having received his PhD in virology from the University of Leuven in Belgium (1973) and graduated in medicine from the University of Lovanium in Kinshasa (1969).

(Bio Credit: National Institute of Health)

Linda-Gail Bekker, MBChB, DTMH, DCH, FCP(SA), PhD, is professor of medicine and deputy director of the Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, University of Cape Town. She is also chief operating officer of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation, a not for profit organization that works to improve the wellbeing of people from some of the poorest communities in South Africa. She is a physician scientist with a keen interest in HIV, tuberculosis and related diseases. Her doctoral work focused on the host response to tuberculosis both with and in the absence of HIV co-infection. Subsequently her research interests have expanded to include programmatic and action research around antiretroviral rollout and TB integration, and prevention of HIV in women, youth and men who have sex with men.

• She has contributed to >250 publications emanating from the HIV Centre on topics relevant to the South African HIV and TB epidemics. In her role in the Foundation, she is passionate about community development and engagement and actively explores new and innovative ways to tackle the challenge that is HIV. She is President-Elect of the International AIDS Society and serves on a number of other national and international committees and boards.

(Bio Credit: International AIDS Vaccine Initiatve) (Image Credit: IAVI)

Manoj Mohanan is Associate Professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, with secondary appointments in the Department of Economics and the Duke Global Health Institute. Prof. Mohanan's research focuses primarily on the economics of health and development, and health policy.

• His past research has examined topics including performance incentive contracts, public private partnerships, quality of care, social franchising, accountability interventions, and household health behavior across multiple countries. These studies have been published in several of the top journals in economics, health policy, and medicine.
• His research also contributed to early evidence on COVID from seroprevalence studies in India. His ongoing research aims to understand long term consequences of large scale disruptions caused by the pandemic and its effect on vulnerability of households. Mohanan was trained as a health economist at Harvard University's Inter-Faculty PhD Program in Health Policy (Economics), and also holds additional degrees in public health and medicine.

Prof. Margaret is a an Associate Professor of Environmental and Population Health and Dean of Public Health at the University of Kenyatta. She's been an important part of Nairobi's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. She lectures in the following areas: Population Health, Medical Demography, Gender Health, Research Methods, Health Education and Promotion. HIV/AIDS Management and Health impact assessment.

• Prof. Margaret Nyanchoka Keraka was the founding chairperson of the Department of Environmental Health at Kenyatta University in 2003, She has been chairperson of the following departments: Environmental and Population Health between 2011 and 2016, Population and Reproductive Health between 2016 and 2018. She is the currently the Dean of the school of Public Health and Applied Human Sciences in Kenyatta University.
• She has participated in the development of Bsc. Community Health programmes for AMREF/Moi University, Bsc. Medical Education programme for the Aga Khan University, Kenya and Bsc Community Health for Technical University of Mombasa.She is interested in research in such areas as: Sexual and Reproductive Health, and HIV AIDS, Maternal and Child Health, and WASH. She has been the Co-coordinator for the Gender Equity in Environmental Health training, a research that was conducted under the African Academy of Environmental Health. She has also been involved in consultative research on evaluating Community Based Health Care Strategy in a Kibwezi Community in Kenya.
• She has co- authored a book on Burden of Childhood Diarrhea from Water, Sanitation and Hygiene focusing on low income settlements in Nairobi. This is begged on the fact that Child mortality in low income settlements is still very high compared to national estimates. In addition she has recently published two papers i.e Factors Associated with Default from Treatment among Tuberculosis Patients in Nairobi Province, Kenya: A Case Control Study and Utilization of Insecticide Treated Nets Utilization Amongst Pregnant Women in Thika District.

(Bio Credit: Kenyatta University People Directory) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Michael Pepper is Director of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Director of the South African Medical Research Council Extramural Unit for Stem Cell Research and Therapy, and a Research Professor in the Department of Immunology in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Pretoria. He is also professeur associé in the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

• Michael obtained his MBChB in 1982 from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, and moved to Geneva in 1986, where he obtained his PhD in 1990, MD in 1992 and Privat Docent in 1997. He returned to South Africa in July 2004. Michael maintains research and teaching commitments in Pretoria and Geneva.
• Michael has worked extensively in the field of clinically-oriented (translational) molecular cell biology and has made seminal contributions to understanding the mechanisms of angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis. His current scientific interests are in the fields of cell and gene therapy and the human genome as well as the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of work in these fields.
• Michael led a consensus study for the Academy of Science of South Africa entitled “Human Genetics and Genomics in South Africa: Ethical, Legal and Social Implications” which was launched in December 2018, and is currently leading a project on the ELSI of gene therapy (including gene editing) in South Africa. He is President and Chairman of the Board of the South African Tissue Bank Association. Michael has also been working with the Department of Health on legislation pertaining to Chapter 8 of the National Health Act and regulations thereto since mid-2009. He was previously a member of the National Advisory Committee on Innovation which advises the Minister of Science and Technology.
• Michael has more than 300 medical and scientific publications with and H-Index of 72/82 (Scopus/Google Scholar). He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and has received a number of awards for his research including the South African Health Excellence Award for Scientific Excellence in 2019. Michael has been extensively involved in teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and has lectured widely on the international circuit. He is frequently solicited as a peer reviewer, and is currently on the editorial boards of Lymphatic Research and Biology and The Journal of Medical Law and Ethics. He interacts frequently with the media and writes for the lay press on scientific and medical matters.

(Bio Credit: University of Pretoria People Directory) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Niki Popper's main research interests are theory and applications of modelling & simulation of dynamic and complex systems, especially: comparative modelling & simulation; coupling and comparison of mathematical model approaches; implementation, parametrization, calibration and validation concepts and domain and application integration of simulation models and Health Outcome Research. He is chairman of the COMET Initiative DEXHELPP (Decision Support for Health Policy and Planning).

(Bio Credit: Tu Wien Informatics) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Professor Pascale Allotey is the Director of the United Nations University International Institute for Global, a position she has held since 2017. She has three decades of experience as a researcher in global health including multidisciplinary background, and experience working across four continents to promote health and well-being.
-She is a nurse, midwife and public health nurse with postgraduate training in public health, anthropology and epidemiology. Her research in global health covers health equity, health and human rights, gender and social determinants of health, migration, sexual and reproductive health, tropical diseases, and non-communicable diseases, and she has published extensively on these topics. She has worked in several countries in Africa, SE Asia and in Australia. She has pioneered methodological approaches for engaging communities in research and policy processes to ensure joint ownership and partnership in health and service delivery.
-Her Previous positions include Professor of Global Public Health, Deputy Head of School (Research and Development), and founding Associate Director of the South-East Asia Community Observatory (SEACO), School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University (Malaysia), Professor of Race, Diversity and Professional Practice at Brunel University London, UK, and Snr Research Fellow at the WHO Collaborating Centre for Women’s Health, University of Melbourne, Australia.
-She is also a technical advisor on several WHO committees in Geneva, including serving as co-Chair of the Gender and Rights Advisory Panel; a member of the Technical Advisory Group on Universal Health Coverage for the WHO Western Pacific Region office in Manila; and associate editor for several public health and global health journals.
-She holds a PhD in Public Health and a MMedSci degree in Community Health from the University of Western Australia.

Professor Marriott has worked tirelessly to identify ways to help Aboriginal families become healthier and more resilient over the course of her 50-year career in nursing, midwifery and academia. Murdoch University Vice Chancellor Eeva Leinonen said the awarding of the AM to Professor Marriott was thoroughly deserved recognition of her distinguished careers in Nursing, Academia and Aboriginal health and wellbeing. Professor Marriott’s research interests and expertise include culturally inclusive clinical best practice, incorporation of social and emotional wellbeing concepts into models of health care, Aboriginal maternal and early childhood, cultural competence, and capacity building the Indigenous health workforce.

(Bio Credit: Mudoch University) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Shabir Madhi is the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He also holds the position of Director of the South African Medical Research Council Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit (VIDA) and is co-Director of the African Leadership Initiative for Vaccinology Expertise (ALIVE).

• He is an internationally recognised for his research on life saving vaccines against childhood pneumonia and diarrhea, which informed WHO recommendations on their use in low and middle income settings. He has also led studies on the clinical development of vaccines for pregnant women aimed at protection of mother-infant dyads.
• Most recently he led the first two COVID-19 vaccine studies being undertaken in Africa, and has been involved in multiple epidemiological studies on Covid-19 in South Africa. He has been widely complemented for his stance on Covid-19 in South Africa, where he is considered a trusted voice unafraid to speak truth to power.

Shahid Jameel is Director, Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University, India since October 2020. Prior to this he was Chief Executive Officer of the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance from April 2013 to September 2020. He did his PhD in Biochemistry from Washington State University (USA) and his postdoctoral work in Molecular Virology from the University of Colorado Medical School (USA). Prior to joining India Alliance, Shahid was Group Leader of Virology at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (New Delhi, India) for over 25 years, where his research focused on the hepatitis E virus and HIV. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed papers and has served on various review and advisory committees of the Government of India and WHO. His research was funded through internal funds from ICGEB and extramural grants from the Government of India, an International Senior Research Fellowship of the Wellcome Trust (UK) and an International Research in Infectious Disease grant from the National Institutes of Health (USA). Shahid received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in Medical Sciences, which is India’s highest mid-career research award. He is also a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, India.

• Having been a successful scientist and Group Leader for over 25 years, Shahid's foray into science funding and policy was not an accident, but a planned career move. He enjoys interacting with people, communicates well and has the passion to train the next generation. He plans to use his experience to help produce the next generation of academic leaders in India who are competitive by any international metric. Shahid also strongly believes that while there is sufficient talent in India and in the diaspora, Indian science in particular and institutions in general will excel only when they are unshackled through efficient management with transparency and good governance as its essential components.

(Bio and Image Credit: Linkedin) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Sumegha Asthana is a physician, health administrator and a health policy and systems researcher by training. She is an honorary lecturer at the Centre for Global Health, Institute of Population Health Sciences, Queen Mary University of London. Her public health journey started ten years ago in India with a masters in health administration from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. After which she worked with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) as a consultant under National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), a flagship programme by the government of India, to tackle the high burden of maternal, neonatal and child morbidity and mortality among India's rural populations. This was followed by her doctoral research in social medicine which is based at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Sumegha is a Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellow (SYLFF) supported by the Tokyo Foundation, Japan and a DAAD scholar under the “A New Passage to India” program at Bielefeld University, Germany. She is an advocate for decolonizing global health and building HPSR capacities in LMICs. Her research interests include conceptualization of health systems and health systems strengthening, politics of development aid in health, global health governance and mainstreaming of alternate systems of medicine in public health systems in India. She is the country lead of the India chapter of a global social movement called Women in Global Health, which aims to achieve gender equality in global health leadership.

• Other roles Sumegha has taken up include: Consultant at the Institute of Public Health (Bengaluru) and Consultant(SRMNCAH) at the WHO.

(Bio Credit: LSE) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Taryn Young is Director of the Centre for Evidence-based Health Care and coordinator of the MSc in Clinical Epidemiology at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University and consultant to the South African Cochrane Centre, she is an epidemiologist with a specialist degree in Public health and considerable expertise in the field of evidence-based health care. She coordinates international collaborative projects which facilitate the use of best evidence in healthcare policy and practice and currently leads the coordination of the Effective Health Care Research Consortium in the African region. This Consortium is an International Group including partners from the United Kingdom, India, China and Africa. She works with the International Cochrane Collaboration and has conducted many systematic reviews and provided intensive training, mentorship and editorial support to authors of Cochrane and other systematic reviews. She supports the work of the South African Cochrane Centre by supporting the development and implementation of training, mentoring and support for Cochrane authors from 25 countries in Sub Saharan Africa.

• Furthermore, she is a editor with both the Cochrane Sexually Transmitted Infections Group based in South America) and the Cochrane Occupational Health Group based in Sweden) and has served on the Advisory Committee of the Cochrane Public Health Group who has a base in Australia). At the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University, she coordinates the Masters in Clinical Epidemiology and also play a key role in the curriculum development, implementation and evaluation of training programmes for under- and postgraduate students in public health and epidemiology, evidence-based healthcare and research synthesis. Within MSc in Clinical Epidemiology she has lead the development of blended teaching modules with incorporate the use of emerging technologies thus combining e-learning and face:face contact sessions.
• Nationally and in the African region she teaches evidence-based healthcare and the principles of research synthesis. Within the African region she has offered training in Namibia, Zambia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Ethiopia. She has supervised nine students who have completed their masters degrees and is currently supervising 4 MSc in Clinical Epidemiology students and 1 PhD student. She has also served as an external examiner for postgraduate Epidemiology modules offered at other South African Academic institutions and masters dissertations. She has authored 1 book chapter, 19 peer reviewed publications, and 22 scientific letters. She provides a regular feature on Evidence based Health care to the International Journal of Epidemiology and Current Allergy and Immunology.

(Bio and Image Credit: The Interacademy Partnership, EVBRES)

Prof. Tulio de Oliveira is a bioinformatician that has first moved to South Africa in 1997. He has received his BSc at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil and MSc/PhD at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, UKZN, South Africa. He has been awarded two prestigious fellowships, an European Commission Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, U.K. from 2004 to 2006 (which was selected as one of top 20 inspiring researcher fellows in Europe) and a U.K. Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire and University of Edinburgh from 2015-2019. He was the Director of the Genomics Program at the Wellcome Trust Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies in South Africa and an Affiliate Senior Lecturer at the Division of Infection and Immunity at the University College London (UCL) from 2009 to 2015. In 2015, he became a Professor at UKZN and in 2017, founded KRISP and in 2018, he became an Associate Professor on Global Health at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Prof. de Oliveira has worked for over 20 years with viral outbreaks, including HIV, Hepatitis B and C, Chikungunya, Dengue, SARS-CoV-2, Zika and Yellow Fever Virus. Prof. de Oliveira has more than 150 publications, with many of them in, the top scientific journals, Nature, Science and Lancet.

(Bio Credit: The Conversation) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Schick came to the School of Public Policy from the Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, where he served as a senior specialist. His professional history includes research positions at the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution and teaching positions at Tufts University and Syracuse University.

• Schick's extensive list of publications includes "Congress and Money: Spending, Taxing, and Budgeting" (American Society for Public Administration, 1987), "Making Economic Policy in Congress" (American Enterprise Institute, 1984), "The Capacity to Budget" (1990), "The Budget Puzzle" (1993) and "The Federal Budget: Politics, Policy, Process" (1995). He is founding editor of the professional journal, Public Budgeting and Finance.
• Schick consults for many organizations at federal, state, and local levels. He directed a multinational study of budget practices in various industrialized countries and presently directs a study of the far-reaching reforms in the public sector in six countries: Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States. Among Schick's awards are the Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Society for Public Administration Waldo Prize.

(Bio Credit: University of Maryland People Directory) (Image Credit: University of Maryland)

Chinmay Tumbe is with the Department of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A). He holds a Masters from the London School of Economics & Political Science and a doctorate from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore.

• He was the Jean Monnet Postdoctoral Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2013 and was with the School of Public Policy and Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences Hyderabad in 2014-16. He has worked in academic, corporate and government institutions in India, UK and Italy, served on an Inter-Ministerial Working Group on migration and his research has been featured in journals, newspapers and policy portals.
• His research interests include migration studies, urban economics and business & economic history.

(Bio Credit: Ideas for India) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Danny Quah is Li Ka Shing Professor in Economics and Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS. His research on inequality and income mobility characterises the range of experiences across economies to suggest that a single narrative on inequality is unlikely to be correct or helpful. His work on world order takes an economic approach to international systems, studying the supply and demand of world order: what international system do the world’s superpowers wish to provide; what world order does the global community need?

• Quah is a Commissioner on the Spence-Stiglitz Commission on Global Economic Transformation and serves on the Executive Committee, International Economic Association; the Advisory Board, LSE IDEAS; the Eminent Advisory Council of the UNDP Bureau for Asia-Pacific; and the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council for Geopolitics. He is the author of “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity”.

Daron Acemoglu is Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences (United States), the Science Academy (Turkey), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists.

• He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007.
• He was the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, awarded every two years to the best economist in the United States under the age of 40 by the American Economic Association, and the Erwin Plein Nemmers prize awarded every two years for work of lasting significance in economics.Daron Acemoglu’s areas of research include political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, innovation, search theory, network economics and learning.
• His recent research focuses on the political, economic and social causes of differences in economic development across societies; the factors affecting the institutional and political evolution of nations; and how technology impacts growth and distribution of resources and is itself determined by economic and social incentives. In addition to scholarly articles, Daron Acemoglu has published four books: "Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" (joint with James A. Robinson), which was awarded the Woodrow Wilson and the William Riker prizes, "Introduction to Modern Economic Growth", "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power"_, "Prosperity, and Poverty" (joint with James A. Robinson), which was a New York Times bestseller in 2012; and Principles of Economics (joint with David Laibson and John List).

(Bio Credit: MIT Faculty Directory) (Image credit: The British Academy )

Gita Gopinath is the John Zwaanstra Professor of International Studies and of Economics at Harvard University. She is currently on leave of public service from the economics department to serve as the Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In that role she is the Director of IMF's Research Department and the Economic Counsellor of the Fund.

• Professor Gopinath's research focuses on International Finance and Macroeconomics. She is the co-editor of the current Handbook of International Economics and was earlier the co-editor of the American Economic Review, managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies, and co-director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• She is currently a member of the Group of Thirty and the Council on Foreign Relations. Earlier she was a member of the economic advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Economic Adviser to the Chief Minister of Kerala state in India, and member of the Eminent Persons Advisory Group on G-20 Matters for India's Ministry of Finance.
• Professor Gopinath is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society. She is the recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour conferred on overseas Indians by the Government of India, and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Washington. The International Economic Association named her the Schumpeter-Haberler Distinguished Fellow, the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association recognized her with the John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and the Carnegie Corporation named her among Great Immigrants.
• She was named among Bloomberg 50 people who defined 2019, Foreign Policy named her one of the Top Global Thinkers, Time Magazine named her among the Women who Broke Major Barriers to Become 'Firsts', Vogue India recognized her one of the Women of the Year, and she was named among Most Influential Princeton Alumni. Earlier the IMF named her one of the top 25 economists under 45, Financial Times named her one of the 25 Indians to Watch, and she was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
• Before coming to Harvard, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, after earning a B.A. from Lady Sri Ram College, and M.A. degrees from the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Washington.

(Bio Credit: Harvard University Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Hilary is an internationally acclaimed social entrepreneur working with communities and governments around the world to design collaborative, affordable solutions to big social challenges. Innovations include new approaches to employment, ageing and chronic health conditions. Transformation is achieved through an emphasis on human relationships supported by technology.

• Hilary’s current work focuses on the need for a ‘fifth social revolution’: to enable widespread flourishing in this century as work, society and our economies go through deep structural change.
• Hilary’s book "Radical Help on the future of welfare" was published to widespread acclaim in June 2018 by Little Brown UK. Her TED talk on the future of social systems has had over 750,000 views.
• Hilary was educated at Oxford, Sussex and the Open University. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Hilary has been recognised by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader and was named UK Designer of the Year in 2005 for her work pioneering social design. She was awarded an OBE in 2019 for services to the welfare state. Hilary lives in London.

(Bio and Image Credit: The RSA)

Ila Patnaik is a Professor at NIPFP. Prior to this, she was the Principal Economic Advisor to the Government of India from May 2014 to December 2015.

• Prior to joining NIPFP, she has worked at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER), and as Economics Editor at the Indian Express. Her main area of interest is open economy macroeconomics, including issues related to capital flows, the exchange rate regime, monetary policy, business cycles and the financial sector in the context of opening of the capital account.
• Her recent papers deal with India's experience with capital flows, methods for testing, dating and monitoring structural change of the exchange rate regime, an examination of the exchange rate regime in India and China, questions of moral hazard in the currency exposure of firms, and explaining the change in home bias against Indian firms.

(Bio and Image Credit: NIPFP Faculty Directory)

Professor Sir Julian Le Grand is a member of the Marshall Institute at the London School of Economics. He was awarded a knighthood in 2015 for services to social sciences and public service.

• He is an economist by training, and the author, co-author or editor of over twenty books, and more than one hundred articles and book chapters on economics, philosophy and public policy.
• From 2003 to 2005 he was seconded to No 10 Downing St to serve as Senior Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister.
• He has also chaired many UK government panels and working parties and has advised to the President of the European Commission, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, and the OECD.
• He is one of the principal architects of the UK’s public service reforms designed to empower users and providers.
• His other policy innovations include the Pupil Premium, Social Work Practices, Partnership Schemes for funding pensions and long term care, and Universal Basic Capital.

Kate Raworth is the author of "Doughnut Economics: Seven ways to think like a 21st century economist" and co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab. Kate is currently a senior associate at Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute, and is also a Professor of Practice at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. In the past, she co-authored the UNDP's Human Development Report. She is a member of the Club of Rome and currently serves on the World Health Organisation Council on the Economics of Health for All.

(Bio and Image Credit: https://www.kateraworth.com/about/)

Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Born and raised in India, Prof. Muralidharan earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University (summa cum laude), an M.Phil. in economics from Cambridge University (ranked first), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. His research spans development, public, and labor economics with a focus on improving the effectiveness of public spending in the social sector (education, health, and social protection programs).

• His research program is characterized by large-scale randomized experiments conducted in partnership with governments to study the impact of programs and policies at scale. His research has been published in leading economics journals including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Journal of Political Economy; and also been featured in global media outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the Economist in addition to several leading Indian newspapers.
• Prof. Muralidharan is a Research Associate of the NBER, on the Board of Directors of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT where he is co-chair of the education research program, and a Fellow and Board Member of the Bureau of Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). He is actively involved in policy advising and capacity building in India at both the central and stategovernment level, writes a column on economic policy for the Hindustan Times, and teaches a popular course on the Indian Economy at UCSD.

(Bio and Image Credit: UCSD People Directory)

Professor Landry Signé is a world-renowned professor and leading practitioner who has won over seventy prestigious awards and distinctions globally for his academic, policy, business, and leadership accomplishments.

• He has received the fastest reported tenure and promotion to the highest rank of full professor in the history of the U.S. universities in his discipline. He is the Managing Director and Professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program and the Africa Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution, Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University’s Centre for African Studies, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance, and the World Economic Forum’s Regional Action Group for Africa, among others. He is also chairman of the Global Network for Africa’s Prosperity, senior adviser to top global leaders (presidential, ministerial, and C-suite levels), and author of numerous books, including Unlocking Africa's Business Potential.
• Professor Signé’s achievements have been recognized internationally with dozens of distinctions for his accomplishments as an extraordinary professor, prolific author, cutting-edge scholar, influential public intellectual, exemplary and dedicated academic leader, innovative entrepreneur, sought-after strategic thinker, problem-solver, board member, and keynote speaker. He was selected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader for “finding innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues,” an Andrew Carnegie Fellow for being one of the “most creative thinkers,” a Desmond Tutu Fellow for driving “the transformation of Africa,” a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Fellow for “preeminent scholarship uniting the world of ideas to the world of policy,” and one of JCI’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons in the World for “extraordinary achievements and dedication exemplifying the best attributes and leadership in academia.”
• He has won numerous academic awards, including the American Political Science Association Campus Teaching Award, the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Academic Research and Creative Activity. As a pioneer in Silicon Valley, he is the first to have taught at Stanford an award-winning course presenting Africa as a continent of economic opportunities (Emerging African Markets: Strategies, Investments and Government Affairs). In addition, he has been on numerous global boards and councils, and has been a visiting scholar globally, including at the universities of Oxford, Stanford, Georgetown, Montreal, Ottawa, Witwatersrand, among others. He often engages with global policymakers and business leaders to bridge the world of ideas and practice, has testified before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. International Trade Commission, as well as briefed top global leaders. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, CNBC, Forbes, the Hill, and Harvard International Review, among others.

Mario Calderini, a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Manchester, is full Professor at Politecnico di Milano, School of Management, where he teaches Management for Sustainability and Impact. He is the Director of Tiresia, the Politecnico di Milano School of Management’s Research Centre for Impact Finance and Innovation.
-He is cabinet advisor to the Minister of Innovation Vittorio Colao and a member of the Sustainable Finance for Infrastructure Advisory Board established by Minister Enrico Giovannini.
-He has been the Director of Alta Scuola Politecnica and Executive Vice President of Fondazione Politecnico. He served as senior advisor to several Ministers of University Research and Innovation and Government’s Sherpa for the G7 Italian Presidency 2017.
-His numerous publications in highly ranked international journals cover several topics in the field of innovation and social impact finance. He has been a member of the G8 Task Force for Social Impact Investment; he chaired the Italian Advisory Board on Social Impact Finance; he is the President of the Scientific Committee of the Social Impact Agenda for Italy Association (Italy’s NAB). He sits in the Italian Government’s Advisory Group on Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Measurement, and he contributed to promoting the social innovation agenda in Italy, launching the sector’s first public consultation. He was part of the Government’s Advisory Group that drafted the new law on social entrepreneurship.
-He is the President of the Advisory Board for Research and Innovation Strategy of the Lombardy Region Government. He sits in the Advisory Board of Unicredit Group, in the Sustainability Advisory Board of Bolton Group and Edison, and in the Directors Board of Fondazione De Agostini.

(Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Baroness Nemat (Minouche) Shafik is a leading economist whose career has straddled public policy and academia. She was appointed Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science in September 2017.

• She did her BA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, her MSc at LSE and her DPhil at the University of Oxford and, by the age of 36, had become the youngest ever Vice President of the World Bank. She taught at Georgetown University and the Wharton Business School and has published widely. She served as the Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Development from 2008 to 2011, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund from 2011-2014 and as Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 2014-2017, where she sat on all the monetary, financial and prudential policy committees and was responsible for a balance sheet of over £500 billion.
• Minouche has served on and chaired numerous boards and currently serves as a Deputy Chair of the British Museum, and is a member of the Supervisory Board of Siemens, the Council of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and the Global Board of BRAC. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2015 and made a cross-bench peer in the House of Lords in 2020.
• Her book "What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract" is out now.

Paul Smoke is Professor of Public Finance and Planning and was founding director of the international development specializations at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.
-His research and policy interests include urban and regional development and the political economy of public sector reform, with a particular focus on fiscal decentralization. He previously taught in the International Development Program and chaired the master’s in city planning program at MIT, and before which he worked as a resident policy advisor with the Harvard Institute for International Development in Kenya and Indonesia. Smoke is also a Senior Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute (London), serves on the Economic Advisory Council of the Millennium Challenge Corporation and chairs the Advisory Board of the Local Public Sector Alliance. Smoke received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
-Smoke’s work has covered more than two dozen countries, primarily in East and Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, with some experience in South Asia and Latin America. He has worked with many international organizations. Selected efforts include co-managing an initiative on the political economy of decentralization at the World Bank, advising on the development of a handbook on democratic decentralization practice for USAID, leading a comprehensive review of evidence on the impact of decentralization on local development outcomes for the former UK Department for International Development, developing an integrated decentralization diagnostic with the European Commission, working with a consortium of international agencies on enhancing subnational finance for the Inter-Agency Task Force on Financing for Development, participating in an OECD-led group working on fiscal decentralization and inclusive growth in Asia, advising a World Bank Independent Evaluation Group review of strengthening subnational government capacity, and conducting a study on the role Latin American subnational governments played in the COVID-19 pandemic with the Inter-American Development Bank.
-Smoke’s most recent work is an NYU Wagner study (funded by the Gates Foundation on reforming the architecture for public finance reform in developing countries, including an examination of how the structure of intergovernmental finances affects service delivery. He has published in numerous journals, including World Development, Public Administration and Development, International Journal of Public Administration, Third World Planning Review, Regional Development Dialogue, Public Budgeting and Finance, Economic Development Quarterly, and Journal of Developing Areas. He has written or edited several books, including "Decentralization in Asia and Latin American: Towards a Comparative Interdisciplinary Perspective" (2007) and "Making Decentralization Work: Democracy, Development and Security" (2010). He is currently co-editor of Public Administration and Development.

Rathin is ODI’s Managing Director. His policy interests and research has mainly focused on fiscal and macroeconomic issues pertinent to human development in developing and emerging economies.

• Rathin was formerly the Director and CEO of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in New Delhi. He has previously worked as an Economic Diplomat and Policy Advisor at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with postings in London, New York, Kathmandu and Brasilia. He has also served as an Economic Adviser with the Thirteenth Finance Commission, New Delhi, in the rank of Joint Secretary to the Government of India.
• Rathin Roy holds a Ph.D and an M.Phil in Economics from the University of Cambridge, an MA in Economics from the Jawaharlal Nehru University and BA (Hons) in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. He has taught at the Universities of Manchester and London.

(Bio and Image Credit: ODI.org)

Rebecca Henderson is one of 25 University Professors at Harvard, a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of both the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• She is an expert on innovation and organizational change, and her research explores the degree to which the private sector can play a major role in building a more sustainable economy, focusing particularly on the relationships between organizational purpose, innovation and productivity in high performance organizations.
• Rebecca sits on the board of CERES, and has more than twenty five years cumulative experience on major corporate boards. In 2019 she was named one of three “Outstanding Directors of the year” by the Financial Times. 
• Her publications include "Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective", and "Accelerating Energy Innovation: Lessons from multiple sectors". For several years she taught “Reimagining Capitalism: Business & the Big Problems”, a course that grew from 28 students to over 300 and that is the basis for the recently released "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire" – a book that was shortlisted for the FT/McKinsey 2020 Business Book of the Year Award.

(Image and Bio Credit: HBS faculty Directory)

Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University. She is a co-editor of American Economic Review: Insights.

• Pande’s research is largely focused on how formal and informal institutions shape power relationships and patterns of economic and political advantage in society, particularly in developing countries. She is interested the role of public policy in providing the poor and disadvantaged political and economic power, and how notions of economic justice and human rights can help justify and enable such change.
• Her most recent work focuses on testing innovative ways to make the state more accountable to its citizens, such as strengthening women’s economic and political opportunities, ensuring that environmental regulations reduce harmful emissions, and providing citizens effective means to voice their demand for state services.
• In 2018, Pande received the Carolyn Bell Shaw Award from the American Economic Association for promoting the success of women in the economics profession. She is the co-chair of the Political Economy and Government Group at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Board member of Bureau of Research on Economic Development (BREAD) and a former co-editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics. Before coming to Yale, Pande was the Rafik Harriri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she co-founded Evidence for Policy Design.
• Pande received a PhD in economics from London School of Economics, a BA/MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and a BA in Economics from Delhi University.

(Bio Credit: https://campuspress.yale.edu/rpande/bio/) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Sébastien Arcand holds a PhD in sociology. He is full professor, and currently director of the department of management at HEC Montréal.

• He is interested in the management of ethnocultural diversity within institutions and organizations as well as the difficulties of socio-professional integration of people with an immigrant background. He has conducted research on the identity dimensions of entrepreneurship and is currently interested in sports organizations, their professionalization, and their inclusive and exclusive practices. The transfer of knowledge and skills is at the heart of its research and teaching activities.
• In this capacity, he is Associate Director of HEC Montréal's Pôle Sports (a research transfer hub) and is the scientific leader of the working group, Immigrants in Vocational Training at the Centre d'intervention pédagogique en contexte de diversité at the Centre de service scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeois. He also sits on the Commission de l'éducation des adultes et de la formation continue of the Conseil supérieur de l'éducation du Québec.
• He served for several years on the OQLF's Monitoring Committee on the Evolution of the French Language and on Statistics Canada's Advisory Committee on Linguistic Statistics. He is a member of advisory committees at the Newcomer Office (Bureau d'intégration des nouveaux arrivants) of the City of Montreal and also on the Advisory Committee at the Observatoire québécois des inégalités.
• He frequently works with managers to advise them on intercultural management practices in Quebec, Europe and Latin America (Colombia) and has collaborated on reports for various organizations including the OECD, the Ministère de l'immigration, de la francisation et de l'intégration (MIFI), Emploi-Québec, Canada Economic Development and the City of Montreal. He is a qualified administrator for the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a measure of openness to diversity for organizations and individuals.
• Finally, Sebastien Arcand is a certified soccer coach for a competitive regional boys’ team.

(Image Credit: HEC Montreal)

Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and at the Paris School of Economics. He earned his Ph.D from the London School of Economics – at the age of 22, even winning an award from the French Economics Association for his thesis.

• Piketty is an expert in the study of economic inequality. In his research, he uses a longitudinal approach, drawing from centuries of historical data to better understand the long term impacts of various economic policies for wealth distribution. A vocal proponent for global wealth redistribution, he has concluded that systemic income inequality will never self-correct. Instead, solutions such as a progressive global tax may prove effective. In "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", he suggests that solving income inequality will require deliberate action, but most importantly, that solving income inequality by reforming capitalism is necessary for the ongoing survival of democracy.
• He has written numerous books in French and English, but this book was his most highly acclaimed, earning him the British Academy Medal and reaching #1 on The New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction. In 2015, he turned down the French Legion Medal of Honour on the principle that he would rather be honored by his peers than the government.

(Image Credit: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/)

Yuen Yuen Ang studies political economy and development from a complex adaptive perspective—with an applied focus on China’s rise as one of the greatest disruptions of our times. She is the inaugural recipient of the Theda Skocpol Prize for Emerging Scholar, awarded by the American Political Science Association for “impactful empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributions to the study of comparative politics.” She is the author of "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap" (2016) and "China's Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption" (2020). She has won multiple book and essay awards across disciplines. Foreign Affairs named her writing among the "Best of Print."

• Professor Ang is frequently invited to advise and speak across academic, business, foreign policy, development policy, and civic communities around the world. She writes for a broad audience in outlets such as Foreign Affairs and Project Syndicate. Her work is cited and featured in both English and Chinese outlets, including CGTN’s Visionaries, Financial Times, Project Syndicate, The Economist, The New York Times, and most recently, Freakonomics Radio.
• A native of Singapore, Ang received her B.A. from Colorado College and her PhD from Stanford University. Previously, she was on the faculty of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

(Image and Bio Credit: https://sites.google.com/view/yuenyuenang)

Ben Clifford took up his post as ‘Lecturer in Spatial Planning and Government’ within the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London (UCL) at the end of April 2009 and was subsequently promoted to Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor within the School. Born and raised in the exciting ‘edge city’ of Croydon, he is a geographer by background and training.

• His interest in planning developed whilst studying geography at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Following this, Ben returned to London to undertake PhD research at King’s College (KCL). His PhD was funded through the then ESRC-ODPM joint scheme and his thesis, titled: "Planning at the Coalface: British Local Authority Planners" and the "Experience of Planning and Public Sector Reform" examined how local authority planners, as ‘street-level’ professionals, were reacting to New Labour’s reforms of the planning system whilst they were helping to implement them. Overall he argued that ‘the coalface’ has a vital role in shaping the contours of modernisation and for a more implementation-focused examination of state reforms.
• During the course of this PhD research, Ben was seconded for three months to work in Communities and Local Government (the then government department responsible for planning in England) to assist with work on planning reform. This initial secondment was then followed by a further three month period spent working as a policy advisor on the secretariat of the Killian Pretty Review, a national review of the planning application process.
• At UCL, Ben has been involved in research on devolution and planning, local authority housebuilding, deregulation and planning (particularly permitted development in England) and outsourcing and the public interest in planning. His research on permitted development was recognised with an RTPI prize in 2018. He has academic visiting positions with the University of Melbourne and Public Health England.
• Ben's recent research has focused on local authority housebuilding, deregulation and planning (particularly permitted development in England), outsourcing and the public interest in planning and infrastructure planning. His research has led to improvement in permitted development rights in England. Alongside Janice Morphet, his research on local authority house building has been featured in The Times, The Guardian and the BBC.

(Bio Credit: UCL Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Christine Mahoney is a Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. - She studies social justice advocacy, activism and direct action through social entrepreneurship. Her first book "Brussels vs. the Beltway" (Georgetown University Press) explored how advocates shape public policy in two of the most powerful political systems on the planet: the US and the EU. She conducted fieldwork in 7 conflict zones in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America for her second book "Failure and Hope: Fighting for the Rights of the Forcibly Displaced" (Cambridge University Press). The book argues we need to advance social entrepreneurship for the 60 million people displaced by violent conflict worldwide.

• Her work inspired the launch of the Refugee Investment Network, where she serves as fellow and advisor. The Refugee Investment Network (RIN) is the first impact investing and blended finance collaborative dedicated to creating durable solutions to global forced migration.
• To help foster innovative solutions to social problems she launched and led Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia for a decade. Over ten years, SE@UVA taught over 2,500 students, engaged over 8,000, had over 700 students declare a minor in Social Entrepreneurship, mentored over 80 student social enterprise teams, supported over 100 social entrepreneurs and impact investors with over 38,400 hours of pro-bono consulting, and mobilized $7.7 million in resources to support its mission.
• She was previously an Assistant Professor at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University and the Director of the Center for European Studies and the Maxwell European Union Center. She has been a Fulbright Fellow, Visiting Scholar at Oxford, a National Science Foundation grant recipient, recipient of the Emerging Scholar award from the American Political Science Association and she regularly comments in the media including appearances in: the National Journal, Quartz, Impact Alpha, Triple Pundit, Politico, the Virginia Pilot, the Daily Progress, Charlottesville Tomorrow, Next Billion, BBC, and NPR, CBS, and NBC affiliates.

Dr Eleanor Carter is Research Director of the Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab) in the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. The GO Lab was established in 2016 as a partnership between the School and the UK Government to develop a centre of excellence for the commissioning of public services to improve social outcomes. The GO Lab blends rigorous research with practical engagement with all levels of government, both in the UK and around the world, and Dr Carter has been at the forefront of these efforts.

• Dr Carter’s research focuses on an area of social policy that is not often explored. Rather than evaluating the effectiveness of high-level policies or direct impact of particular interventions, it explores the ‘middle space’ of commissioning approaches. Her work examines the potential for innovative contracting models like social impact bonds (SIBs) to improve the outcomes that are ultimately achieved in the lives of service users.
• In October 2020, Dr Carter was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship, to investigate how government can better manage public services outsourcing. The Fellowship will explore whether the current focus on commissioning individual public services is fit-for-purpose, and how the use of delivery ecosystems and networks might better serve the people who use them. This work involves substantial engagement with government at a range of levels, including local councils and central departments.

Eric is a master’s graduate in social planning and administration. He is Adjunct Associate Professor of Social Development at the University of Cape Town and also founder and director of the Centre for Early Childhood Development. Eric has worked in the non-profit sector for 36 years, and has lectured at various universities and consulted to a range of non-profit organisations around South Africa. He has published extensively, including refereed and peer-reviewed articles, chapters in books and conference proceedings and numerous articles in the media.

• He completed his PhD in 2019 on “An Interpretive Analysis of the Early Childhood Development Policy Trajectory in Post-apartheid South Africa”. Across his various roles, Dr Atmore uses his research into the field of early childhood development and education to advocate for young children to access early education throughout South Africa. He works with and speaks up to government officials across all spheres of government - local, provincial and national; without fear of the consequences. He uses his research to back up his advocacy work - and is always on the coal-face of issues in South Africa; either working against government departments, or with them - to achieve the best possible outcomes for young South Africa children.

(Bio Credit: Breadline Africa) (Image Credit: University of Cape Town)

The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies; Institute Director, The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. An economist and political scientist, Robinson has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences.

• Robinson has a particular interest in Latin America, where he has taught every summer for over 25 years at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, and in sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted fieldwork and collected data in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. He has published three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT. The first, "Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy", proposed a theory of the emerge of and stability of democracy and dictatorship. Their second book "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), pulled together much of their joint research on comparative development and proposed a theory of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. Their most recent book, "The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty", examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world.

(Bio Credit: The Pearson Institute) (Image Credit: University of Chicago)

Jessica Pykett is a social and political geographer who researches the influence of knowledge on policy innovations and the outcomes of particular forms of behavioural governance for citizens. Her research also traces the sociodigital futures imagined and ethical frameworks deployed in behavioural and neuroscientific research, applications and governance.

• As co-founder of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing, University of Birmingham, her research is informed by productive engagement with policy-makers.

Mekhala Krishnamurthy is Associate Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at Ashoka University and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), New Delhi. At CPR, Mekhala leads the State Capacity Initiative, a major interdisciplinary research and practice programme committed to addressing the challenges and possibilities of building state capacity in democratic and federal India. Working in close collaboration with governments and a growing team of policy scholars and researchers, the State Capacity Initiative focuses on institutional design, implementation and administrative capacity of the Indian state; the norms, values and organisational cultures of public bureaucracies and public workers; the particular challenges of regulatory and fiscal capacity; and the complex and changing relations between society, politics and state capacity in India.

• Over the last twenty years, Mekhala’s research, policy and professional engagements have involved work across a range of field sites and subjects, including informal women's courts, popular justice and dispute resolution, community health workers and public health and nutrition, agriculture and agricultural markets, and land, water and livelihoods. In the process, her work has placed her at the intersections of and in partnerships between academia, public policy, government, grassroots civil society organisations, the private sector and philanthropic foundations. Mekhala teaches a range of courses on the anthropology of the everyday state and market, political economy, bureaucracy, and citizenship. She also works on strengthening pedagogical innovation and practice in public administration training and capacity building institutions in India. In addition to her academic scholarship, she is a regular contributor in the print and electronic media. Throughout, it is her commitment to longterm fieldwork in local communities and among frontline workers of the Indian state that grounds and sustains her practice.
• Mekhala graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University, received an M.Phil. in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from University College London, where she was a UCL Global Excellence Scholar. She is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.

Nicola Rollock is Professor of Social Policy & Race at King’s College London. She is also Senior Adviser on Race & Higher Education to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and holds an honorary position as Distinguished Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

• Nicola is also Specialist Adviser to the Home Affairs’ Select Committee’s Macpherson: 22 Years On Inquiry, is a member of the Wellcome Trust’s Anti-racism Expert Group and of the British Science Association’s Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Group.
• She is probably best known for her research on Black female professors and the related exhibition Phenomenal Women: portraits of UK Black female professors which went on display at London's Southbank Centre in 2020 and at the University of Cambridge in 2021.
• In Summer 2020, she appeared as an expert contributor in the multi award-winning two-part Channel 4 documentary The school that tried to end racism which tracked a group of Year 7 pupils as they explored their racial bias through a range of specially designed activities.
• In December 2019, she was selected by Times Higher journalists as one of 11 scholars globally to have influenced the debate in higher education and, in October 2020, was included, following nomination by Baroness Doreen Lawrence, in the Duke & Duchess of Sussex’s list of Next Generation Trailblazers for challenging prejudice and contributions to British society.
• As well as writing academically, Nicola has written for The Guardian, British Vogue and The Financial Times. She is currently writing her first sole authored book "The Racial Code" which will be published by Penguin Press in 2022.

(Image Credit: Elliott Franks)

Peter Hupe is interested in the ways public actors fulfill public tasks. From a comparative perspective he has a particular focus on discretion as controlled freedom. How do 'professionals in public service' deal with such freedom and what does that mean for governmental performance? After university and military service, Peter Hupe chose a career as a policymaker in the Dutch national civil service. There he became socialized in the art and craft of policy formation and also discovered the relevance of policy implementation. He made that choice for public service, having a master’s degree in Political Science (cum laude, Free University Amsterdam) and before obtaining a doctorate at Leiden University. At Erasmus University Rotterdam he taught and undertook research in Public Administration for more than thirty years. From that institutional basis he had academic affiliations in Leiden, Leuven, London, Oxford and Potsdam. Retired from his position in Rotterdam, he currently is Visiting Professor at the Public Governance Institute, KU Leuven, Belgium and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, UK.

(Bio Credit: University of Birmingham Staff Directory) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Ricardo Paes de Barros is the Director of Social Policy and Research at the National Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA) in Brazil. He has been a researcher at IPEA for over 20 years, and is the author of numerous books and scientific publications on labor and human development economics in Brazil, including an award-winning article on "The evolution of welfare, poverty and inequality in Brazil over the last three decades: 1960-1990".

• Dr. Barros holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, U.S.A., and a masters in Statistics from the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has also conducted postdoctoral research at both the Chicago University and Yale University, U.S.A.

(Bio Credit: Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group) (Image Credit: Valor Econômico)

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) a non-partisan research and policy analysis organization developing transformative, evidence-based solutions for K–12 public education. Her research focuses on U.S. public school system reforms, including public school choice and charter schools; innovation and scale; portfolio management; and effective state and local public oversight practices.

• Lake has authored numerous studies and provided expert testimony and technical assistance on charter schools, district-charter collaborations, and urban school reform. She is the editor of Unique Schools Serving Unique Students: Charter Schools and Children with Special Needs and editor of Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools. She co-authored, with Paul Hill, "Charter Schools and Accountability in Public Education". She has provided invited testimonies to the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee as well as various state legislatures.
• She presents regularly at conferences and summits around the United States, and has advised on charter school implementation in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Lake serves as a board member or advisor to various organizations, including the Journal of School Choice, the National Center on Special Education in Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and Education Next. She was named to the summer 2016 class of the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellows Program, designed to support exceptional leaders reimagining U.S. public schools.
• Lake holds a BA in International Studies and an MPA in Education and Urban Policy from the University of Washington. She currently serves as Affiliate Faculty, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, at the University of Washington Bothell.

(Bio Credit: CRPE Directory) (Image Credit: LinkedIn)

Savvas helps city leaders brainstorm through some of the world's greatest challenges. A veteran educator, he has been teaching at the London School of Economics for over 20 years.

• He is the co-Director of the Executive Masters in Cities, which he co-founded with Philipp Rode. He has helped bring systems thinking to the school's undergraduate curriculum via the LSE100 programme. Savvas led the research of the 2013 Rio Urban Age conference. Over the last decade he has also worked with over 500 graduate students on a case method led course on the economic and political analysis of urban projects.
• Savvas consults city and national governments on urban infrastructure strategies and the evaluation of urban projects. His most recent consultations include an infrastructure feasibility study on behalf of the Dutch Government; a review of child friendly urban policies for the Bernard Van Leer Foundation and the design of a city index for the International Federation for Housing and Planning.

Professor Sue Yeandle, PhD, FAcSS, is Director of CIRCLE (the Centre for International Research on Care, Labour & Equalities), a multidisciplinary research centre in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Sheffield. CIRCLE was initially established in 2006 when Sue was at the University of Leeds.

• From November 2021, she is also Principal Investigator of the UK Economic & Social Research Council’s new Centre for Care, which has over £10m of funding (2021-26) as a prestigious ESRC Research Centre. Prior to this she led the Sustainable Care: connecting people & systems programme (also funded by the ESRC).
• Sue is founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Care & Caring, a peer-reviewed journal of The Policy Press established in 2017 and a member of the Leadership Team for IMPACT (Improving Adult Care Together), an evidence implementation centre established in 2021 with funding from the Health Foundation and the ESRC.
• Sue’s research focuses on societal arrangements for the care of people with disabilities, long-term conditions and vulnerabilities that affect their daily lives. Studies have focused on work-care reconciliation policies and practices; people’s caring roles across the life course; the evolution and working conditions of the paid and unpaid care workforce; international policy developments affecting care and caring; and the role of technology in evolving systems of care and support.
• Sue has published widely and has acted as an adviser to UK government and parliamentary committees. She is proud of the collaborations she has built with care sector organisations and with the carers’ movement in the UK, in Europe and around the world.

Dr Sylvia Croese is based in the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is an urban sociologist with a PhD from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. Her research interests, teaching experience and publications include work on urban politics and governance through the lens of housing, land, urban infrastructure and mobility, with a focus on Southern and Lusophone Africa.

• Prior to joining Wits, she was a researcher with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town where her work examined the implementation of global urban policy in African cities, particularly the Sustainable Development Goals. Between 2017 and 2019 she served as an embedded researcher in the City of Cape Town as part of the Mistra Urban Futures research project Implementing the New Urban Agenda and The Sustainable Development Goals: Comparative Urban Perspectives and organised a year-long monthly seminar series on the SDGs as part of the PEAK Urban Research programme. She was also the Principal Investigator in the LIRA Agenda 2030 research project Co-producing urban knowledge in Angola and Mozambique through community-led data collection towards meeting SDG 11.

(Bio and Image Credit: UCL Urban Laboratory)

Theda Skocpol (PhD, Harvard, 1975) is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. At Harvard, she has served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (2005-2007) and as Director of the Center for American Political Studies (2000-2006).

• In 2007, Skocpol was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for her "visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence." The Skytte Prize is one of the largest and most prestigious in political science and is awarded annually by the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University (Sweden) to the scholar who in the view of the foundation has made the most valuable contribution to the discipline.
• Skocpol's work covers an unusually broad spectrum of topics including both comparative politics (States and Social Revolutions, 1979) and American politics (Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States, 1992). Her books and articles have been widely cited in political science literature and have won numerous awards, including the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book in political science for the previous year.
• Skocpol's research focuses on U.S. social policy and civic engagement in American democracy, including changes since the 1960s. She has recently launched new projects on the development of U.S. higher education and on the transformations of U.S. federal policies in the Obama era.

(Bio Credit: Harvard University Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: Unsplash)

Angel Hsu is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill and Founder/Director of the Data-Driven EnviroPolicy Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that innovates and applies quantitative approaches to pressing environmental issues.

• Her research explores the intersection of science and policy and the use of data-driven approaches to understand environmental sustainability, particularly in the areas of climate change and energy, urbanisation and air quality.
• As a climate scientist, she is a contributing and lead author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report as well as the 2018 UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Emissions Gap Report. She has also provided expert testimony to the U.S. Senate and U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations.
• In addition to publishing in academic journals, Dr. Hsu has been committed to public outreach and was a TED 2018 Age of Amazement Speaker and recognized as an inaugural Grist 50 leader. She was the Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Fourth Industrial Revolution and Global Public Goods.
• She holds a PhD in Environmental Policy from Yale University.

(Image Credit: Harold Shapiro)

Prof Dr Claudia Kemfert has been head of the department Energy, Transportation, Environment at the German Institute of Economic Research (DIW Berlin) since April 2004 and is Professor of Energy Economics and Energy Policy at the Leuphana University, Till 2019 she was Professor of Energy Economics and Sustainability at Hertie School of Governance and from 2004-2009 she was Professor of Environmental Economics at Humboldt University.

• Claudia Kemfert studied economics at the Universities of Bielefeld and Oldenburg (PhD 1998) and Stanford. As part of a research stay, she was at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) in Milan (1998). From January 1999 to April 2000 she headed the junior research group at the Institute for the Rational Use of Energy at the University of Stuttgart. From 2000 to 2004 Claudia Kemfert held a position as junior professor and headed a junior research group at the University of Oldenburg.
• Claudia Kemfert was appointed to the Expert Council for Environmental Issues at the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety in 2016. She was an advisor to EU President José Manuel Barroso and is on advisory boards of various research institutions as well as federal and state ministries as well as the EU Commission. Claudia Kemfert was a member of the High Level Expert Group of the EU Environment Commissioner and the Advisory Group on Energy of the European Commission (DG Research). Since 2011 she has been a member of the Executive Committee of the German Society of the Club of Rome.
• In 2006, Kemfert was recognized as a top researcher in the Elf der Wissenschaft by the DFG, the Helmholtz and Leibniz Associations. In 2011 she received the Urania Medal and the B.A.U.M Environment Prize in the science category and in 2016 the German Solar Prize and the Adam Smith Prize for market-based environmental policy. 2013 she published her book "Kampf für Strom" (English version “The battle about electricity”) in which she describes the myths of the energy debate. 2017 followed her book “Das fossile Imperium schlägt zurück”. Her latest book "Mondays for Future" - "Freitags demonstrieren, Samstags diskutieren und am Montag anpacken und umsetzen" was published in spring 2020.

(Image Credit: Rainer Zensen)

John W McArthur is senior fellow and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. He is also a board governor of the International Development Research Centre and a senior advisor to the UN Foundation.

• John co-founded and co-chairs the 17 Rooms initiative for the Sustainable Development Goals. He previously managed the UN Millennium Project, the advisory body to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and served as chief executive of Millennium Promise Alliance, the international non-governmental organization.
• John was also policy director at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a research fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. He also co-chaired the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice; co-founded the global network of Masters in Development Practice graduate degree programs; and has chaired Global Agenda Councils for the World Economic Forum.
• He serves as a member of the UNICEF advisory group and Policy Horizons Canada’s Deputy Minister Steering Committee. John completed a DPhil (PhD) and MPhil in Economics at Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar); an MPP at Harvard’s Kennedy School; and a BA (Hons) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he grew up spending most of his time in swimming pools.

Keri Facer is Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on understanding how to create the conditions for ecologically sustainable and socially just futures and in developing the roles of education and informal learning in these processes. Her public work is focused on supporting UNESCO’s Futures of Education Commission and developing inclusive Futures practice, participatory collaborative projects with local communities and large scale foresight projects. As Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Futures, she is particularly interested in democratising 'futures literacy', and putting this into productive dialogue with ideas and practices drawing on critical race theory and decolonisation theory. Her most recent book, titled: "Learning Futures", is on the implications of environmental and technological change on the relationship between schools and communities. She was Zennström Professor of Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University from 2018-2020 and the AHRC Leadership Fellow for the Connected Communities Research Programme 2012-2018.

(Bio and Image Credit: University of Bristol Faculty Directory)

Michael Taylor is Professor of Climate Science and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology at the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI).

• He is the co-director of the Climate Studies Group, Mona (CSGM). His research and advocacy revolve around ensuring that the small island developing states in the Caribbean can respond to the challenge of climate change.
• He is a Coordinating Lead Author for the Special Report on 1.5 Degrees produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2019 he was named an ANSA Caribbean Laureate for Excellence in Science.

Dr. Priti Parikh is an Associate Professor at University College London. She heads the Engineering and International Development Centre which researchers infrastructure solutions for resource challenged settings.

• Her research evidences the benefits of providing water, sanitation and energy infrastructure in low-middle income countries. Her research has influenced policy and practice especially the work around evidencing links between infrastructure and Sustainable Development Goals.
• She provides strategic advice through her roles as board member for Happold Foundation and Engineer's Against Poverty and Institution of Civil Engineer's Council member.

Dr Ruth Little is a qualitative social scientist and member of the Institute for Sustainable Food at the University of Sheffield with over 15 years research experience conducting and managing inter-disciplinary projects on agriculture and the environment.

• Since 2012, Ruth has collaborated with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) on numerous co-designed projects. Notably, Ruth wrote the business case for and managed the successful delivery of a complex multi-stakeholder Sciencewise-ERC project entitled Citizen Dialogue on bovine TB. The findings from this multi-method dialogue provided the primary social science evidence for Defra’s development of the 25 Year Strategy for achieving Officially Bovine TB Free status for England. Ruth’s current Economic and Social Research Council-funded research is being used in active policy development to inform Defra’s co-design strategy for the post-Brexit Environmental Land Management scheme.
• Ruth’s research has been cited in numerous Government publications, including The Environmental Audit Committee’s report on "Biodiversity in the UK" and the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee’s report on "Environmental Land Management and the agricultural transition".

Wolfgang Lucht is Co-Head of the Research Department on Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and holds the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Sustainability Science at the Department of Geography at Humboldt University Berlin. He is a member of the German Federal Government’s Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU).

• Wolfgang Lucht is an Earth system scientist. A physicist turned geoecologist and sustainability scientist, his work addresses processes of the changing biosphere, Earth's biogeochemical balances, planetary boundaries, the co-evolution of human societies with the Earth system, and the challenges of Earth system analysis in the Anthropocene.
• Wolfgang Lucht joined PIK in 1999. He was previously been affiliated with Boston University as an adjunct research professor, with Potsdam University as an associate professor and currently holds the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Sustainability Science at the Department of Geography of Humboldt University Berlin since 2009. He has been a contributing author to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports and a lead author on its Special Report on Renewable Energies. He is a Fellow of the Earth League. Clarivate Analytics ranks Wolfgang Lucht as one of the most cited research scientists worldwide.
• Since 2016, he has been a member of the German Federal Government’s Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU), where he currently serves a second term.

(Bio and Image Credit: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

Amanda Clarke is Associate Professor and Public Affairs Research Excellence Chair at Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration. Her research examines digital era public administration, public data governance and government-citizen relations.

• She is author of "Opening the Government of Canada: The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age" and a research fellow with the Canada School of Public Service.
• In 2021 she was awarded a Government of Ontario Early Researcher Award.

Angela Hawken, Ph.D., is a Professor of Public Policy at New York University and Director of the Marron Institute of Urban Management, a think-do tank working in cities and states on critical challenges of urban living, with programs in health and environment, civic analytics, government innovation, transportation and land use, urban expansion, human trafficking, and economic mobility.

• She is the founding director of NYU’s BetaGov, which creates data tools and supports innovation and testing for social good. She works with governments and NGOs in the United States and globally, including South Africa, where she was raised.

B. Guy Peters is currently Maurice Falk Professor of Government at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds the PhD degree from Michigan State University and honorary doctorates from four European universities. He is the author or editor of over 80 books, and has been editor of three major journals. He was also the founding President of the International Public Policy Association. He has also been a consultant for a number of national governments and international organizations including Finland, Canada, Japan, Trinidad and Tobago, UNICEF, UNDP and the OECD.

• Guy Peter's major research interests are in coordination and policy integration, policy design, and patronage appointments in the public service.

Beth Simone Noveck is a professor at Northeastern University, where she directs the Burnes Family Center for Social Change and Impact and its partner project, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance.

• The author of "Solving Public Problems: How to Fix Our Government and Change Our World" (Yale Press 2021), she is also Core Faculty at the Institute for Experiential AI (IEAI) at Northeastern. She is on leave from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering (2021).
• New Jersey governor Phil Murphy appointed her as the state’s first Chief Innovation Officer and Chancellor Angela Merkel named her to her Digital Council in 2018. She is also Visiting Senior Faculty Fellow at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and and a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.

(Image Credit: Képszerkesztőség)

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School.

• In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health.
• From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President's Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Dan's an Associate Professor of Public Policy at University College London, where his current research focuses on "Mission-Driven Bureaucrats", exploring the relationship between motivation, management practice, and performance in Bangladesh, Ghana, Liberia, Thailand, and the US amongst other places.

• Outside the academy Dan was special assistant, then advisor, to successive Ministers of Finance (Liberia); ran a local nonprofit focused on helping post-conflict youth realize the power of their own ideas through agricultural entrepreneurship (East Timor); and has worked for a number of local and international NGOs.
• He’s lived, worked, and/or done research in Bangladesh, East Timor, Ghana, India, Israel, Liberia, The Netherlands, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Thailand, the UK, and the USA. Dan’s a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, a fellow of Harvard's Building State Capability Program, a member of the Scholars Strategy Network, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Policy.

Daniella Diniz is a women’s rights advocate and through her work she has actively coached, mentored, and advised a long list of women in government and helped create a powerful network of women leaders in the public sector in Brazil. Daniella spent 10 years at Columbia University, where she helped build and support the partnerships between the university and counterparts in Latin America having created over 200 programs.

• In 2018, Daniella envisioned and designed the Columbia Women Leadership Network in Brazil a pioneer fellowship program that provides leadership skills, inclusive policy knowledge, and a global network to women in the public service in Brazil.
• Daniella currently leads the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is responsible for the program curriculum, managing and building bridges with institutional partners and advising over 150 students towards career and professional goals in connection with the field.

David Eaves is a Lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also public policy entrepreneur and expert in information technology and government. At Harvard he teaches and writes on digital transformation, digital public infrastructure. He also co-hosts an annual convening of digital government leaders from around the world and co-developed and taught a course of policy analysis that is part of the core curriculum.

• David served as the first Director of Education for Code for America and has provided training for public interest technologists in government such as the Presidential Innovation Fellows at the White House and Code for Canada fellows.
• David also served as co-founder and CEO of a civictech start up that successfully grew to serve over 400 governments across North America. In the past he developed and helped implement collaborative strategies for open source communities such as Drupal and Mozilla. He has also served as a negotiation adviser to numerous tech organizations, governments and environmental groups. He served as negotiation advisor to a coalition of Canadian environmental government organizations during two years of negotiations with the Forestry Products Association of Canada (FPAC) which helped cement the ground-breaking Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.

David Runciman is professor of politics at Cambridge University and the author of several books, including The Politics of Good Intentions (2006), Political Hypocrisy (2008) and The Confidence Trap (2013). Runciman began writing for the London Review of Books in 1996 and has written dozens of book reviews and articles on contemporary politics since, for the LRB and a number of other publications.

• In October 2014, he was appointed head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Runciman gave his inaugural lecture on 24 February 2015 on Political Theory and Real Politics in the Age of the Internet.
• One of Runciman's most influential works is Politics: Ideas in Profile. This book explores what politics is, why do we need it and where, in these troubling times, is it heading. Taking the reader across topics such as the gap between rich and poor to the impact of social media on our political climate, it is a useful resource for anyone who is interested in learning about how politics shapes the world. With reference to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Weber Runciman answer the questions that many ask themselves when discussing politics; such as how there can be such disparity between the wealthiest nations and the least developed.
• Since 2015, Runciman has hosted a podcast called Talking Politics with Professor Helen Thompson. The podcast convenes a panel of academics from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere to speak about current affairs and politics.

(Bio and Image Credit: POLIS, Cambridge)

Dr. Elizabeth Linos is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and the Founder of The People Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. The majority of her research focuses on how to improve government by focusing on its people and the services they deliver. Specifically, her studies consider how we can improve diversity in recruitment and selection, how to reduce burnout at work, and how different work environments affect performance and motivation in government. In her research on behavioral public administration, she also studies how to use low-cost interventions to reduce administrative burdens that low-income households face, with a particular focus on increasing take-up of government programs.

• Dr. Linos' research has been published in academic journals including the Journal for Public Administration Research and Theory (JPART), Public Administration Review (PAR), Econometrica, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (AEJ: Policy), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and others. Her work has also been highlighted in media outlets including the New York Times, The Economist, the BBC, NPR, Slate, and the Harvard Business Review.
• As the former VP and Head of Research and Evaluation at the Behavioral Insights Team in North America, she worked with government agencies in the US and the UK to improve programs using behavioral science and to build capacity around rigorous evaluation. Prior to this role, Dr. Linos worked directly in government as a policy advisor to the Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, focusing on social innovation and public sector reform. She has also worked for the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), evaluating and designing innovative social programs in Bangladesh, Morocco, and France. Dr. Linos holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University, where she also completed her A.B. in Government and Economics, magna cum laude with highest honors.

Francisco Gaetani is currently the Coordinator of the Professional Master Program at Getúlio Vargas Foundation and Board President of the Republica.org Institute. He previous positions have included Vice Minister of Planning, Vice Minister of Environment and President of the National School of Public Administration. Francisco also worked for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), holding the position, among others, of General Coordinator in Brazil and UN Ambassador in Brazil. Francisco received a PhD in Public Administration from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration and Public Policies also from LSE.

(Bio Credit: World Bank Blogs) (Image credit: ANESP)

Gabriela Lotta is a Professor of Public Administration at Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) and a visiting professor at Oxford in 2021. She coordinates the Bureaucracy Studies Center (NEB). She is a professor at the National School of Public Administration, ENAP, a researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), and a researcher in Brazil.Lab from Princeton University. She was a visiting professor at the University of Aalborg (Denmark) in 2019.

• She works mainly in the areas of bureaucracy and policy implementation. She has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, such as Public Administration, Governance, Lancet, Policy, and Politics, among others. She also published ten books.
• Lotta received her B.Sc. in public administration and Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of São Paulo. She is currently developing research about street-level bureaucrats and inequalities and about bureaucratic resistance when facing democratic backsliding.

Gerhard Hammerschmid is Professor of Public Management and Founding Director of the Centre for Digital Governance at the Hertie School. His research focuses on public management reform, comparative public administration, public sector innovation and especially government digitalization.

• He contributed to various EU-funded research projects (COCOPS, LIPSE, EUPACK, TROPICO) on public sector innovation and digital government transformation and has been a guest professor at the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) and the Copenhagen Business School.
• Gerhard Hammerschmid has more than 20 years of experience in public management reforms and communicating research findings to high level government officials and policy makers. His research has published in leading international public management/administration journals and he has worked as expert for both national governments and international organizations.

Graham Smith is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, UK.

• He is a specialist in democratic theory and practice, with particular expertise in democratic innovations – new forms of public participation in political decision making. His publications include "Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation" (Cambridge, 2009), "Can Democracy Safeguard the Future?" (Polity, 2021) and "Democracy in a Pandemic: Participation in Response to Crisis" (University of Westminster Press, 2021, edited with colleagues at the participation charity Involve).
• He is Chair of the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies and the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development and is a long-time collaborator with Participedia and Democracy R&D. His work, particularly on citizens’ assemblies, has influenced practice across a range of countries, including collaborations with governments, practitioners, civil society organisations and activists.

Helen Dickinson is Professor of Public Service Research and Director of the Public Service Research Group at the School of Business, University of New South Wales, Canberra. Her expertise is in public services, particularly in relation to topics such as governance, policy implementation and stewardship of 4th industrial revolution technologies.

• Helen has published nineteen books and over eighty peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics and is also a frequent commentator within the mainstream media. She is co-editor of the Journal of Health, Organization and Management and Australian Journal of Public Administration.
• Helen is also a board member of the Consumer Policy Research Centre. In 2015 Helen was made a Victorian Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia and in 2019 awarded a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has worked with a range of different levels of government, community organisations and private organisations in Australia, UK, New Zealand and Europe on research and consultancy programmes.

Dr Igor Calzada, MBA, FeRSA (www.igorcalzada.com) is a Senior Researcher intersecting digital, urban, and political transformations paying special attention to regional governments on

1. smart city citizenship,
2. benchmarking city-regions, and
3. digital rights/citizenships and data co-operatives.

• Since 2021, he is Senior Researcher at Cardiff University at WISERD funded by the ESRC and since 2012 at the Future of Cities/Urban Transformations ESRC Programmes, University of Oxford funded by EC-H2020, ESRC- Urban Transformations, EC-Marie Curie Regional Programmes, Ikerbasque, and the RSA. More recently, he has served as Senior Advisor to UN-Habitat in Digital Transformation for Urban Areas, People-Centered Smart Cities flagship programme, and worked at the DG Joint Research Centre, European Commission in Italy as Senior Scientist in Digital Transformations (DigiTranScope) and AI (AI Watch).
• With more than 20 years of research/policy experience as Senior Lecturer/Researcher in several universities in Europe and the USA. Particularly during the period 2002-2012 in the Basque Country (Spain), he was director in the Basque Government and worked for this decade in the flagship industrial Basque hub called Mondragon Co-operative Corporation.
• He is the author of the recent monograph "Smart City Citizenship" published by Elsevier. Publications: 53 journal articles; 12 books; 18 book chapters; 27 policy reports; 147 international keynotes; and 32 media articles. His work has been published in academic journals such as Journal of Urban Affairs, Citizenship Studies, Journal of Urban Technology, Space and Polity, Regional Studies Regional Science, Regional Science Policy and Practice, Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy (TGPPP), Sustainability, Smart Cities, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, among others.

Iris Bohnet is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and the co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. She is a behavioral economist, combining insights from economics and psychology to improve decision-making in organizations and society, often with a gender or cross-cultural perspective.

• Her most recent research examines behavioral design to de-bias how we live, learn and work. She is the author of the award-winning book What Works: Gender Equality by Design and advises governments and companies on the topic around the world.
• Professor Bohnet served as academic dean of Harvard Kennedy School from 2011-2014 and 2018-2021. She is also the faculty co-chair of the executive program “Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century” for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders. She serves on the boards, advisory boards or as a patron of Credit Suisse Group, Applied, Edge, We Shape Tech, Women in Banking and Finance, and the UK Government’s Equalities Office. She was appointed to the Gender Equality Advisory Council of the G7 in 2021. She was named one of the Most Influential People in Gender Policy by apolitical in 2018 and 2019, a Leading Thinker of Victoria, Australia, 2016-2019, and has received an honorary degree from the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2016.
• She is married and the mother of two children.

Lise Rykkje is currently a Professor in the Department of Organisation and Administration Theory at the University of Bergen, specializing in public administration. Her most recent publications have been focussed on crisis management and capacity building in government, but she has also written on public management and administrative reform. Her research consistently seeks to improve the work of government.

(Bio and Image Credit: University of Bergen Faculty Directory)

Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose (IIPP). She received her BA from Tufts University and her MA and PhD in Economics from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. Her previous posts include the RM Phillips Professorial Chair at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University. She is a selected fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and of the Italian National Science Academy (Lincei).

• She is winner of international prizes including the 2020 John von Neumann Award, the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values, and the 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She was named as one of the ‘3 most important thinkers about innovation’ by The New Republic, one of the 50 most creative people in business in 2020 by Fast Company, and one of the 25 leaders shaping the future of capitalism by WIRED.
• She is the author of three highly-acclaimed books: "The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths" (2013), "The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy" (2018) and the newly released, *"Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism" *(2021).
• She advises policy makers around the world on innovation-led inclusive and sustainable growth.

(Bio Credit: UCL Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: University College London)

Michael Barzelay has been an academic at the LSE since 1995. As Professor of Public Management, he became a member of the Department of Management at its inception in 2006 and served as Head of Department in 2013-15. Professor Barzelay’s doctoral dissertation, "The Politicized Market Economy: Alcohol in Brazil’s Energy Strategy", was published by University of California Press. He started teaching and researching about public management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government as an Assistant Professor of Public Policy in 1985.In 1992, his first book on public management, "Breaking Through Bureaucracy: A New Vision for Managing in Government" was published by UC Press, with translations in Chinese and Spanish.

• At LSE, Professor Barzelay’s research initially centred on public management policy-making and change, beginning with his Wildavsky Lecture at University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and the 2001 publication of "New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue" (also published in Spanish).This book’s research agenda on public management policy change led to two journal symposia and additional articles, written in collaboration with academics from Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the US. This line of research also resulted in an article about designing case study research projects,as well as in receiving the Naschold Award for Excellence in Public Management Research.

(Image credit: ENAP)

Mitch Weiss is the Richard L. Menschel Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School.

• He created and teaches the school's course on Public Entrepreneurship—on public leaders and private entrepreneurs who invent a difference in the world. He also teaches The Entrepreneurial Manager in the first year of the MBA Program.
• Prior to joining HBS in 2014, Mitch was Chief of Staff and a partner to Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino. Mitch helped shape New Urban Mechanics, Boston’s municipal innovation strategy, and make it a model for peer-produced government and change.
• He is the author of "We the Possibility" from Harvard Business Review Press (2021).

Dr Oliver Escobar is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Edinburgh; Academic Lead on Democratic Innovation at the Edinburgh Futures Institute; and Co-director of CRITIQUE (Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought).

• He co-leads the projects European Smart Urban Intermediaries and Distant Voices, and is a former director of What Works Scotland (a large collaborative research programme to advance public service reform). Oliver works on participatory governance and deliberative democracy, with a focus on policy innovation, political inequalities and the governance of the future. He combines research and practice to develop social and democratic innovations across various policy and community contexts.
• Oliver’s work has been shared in seventy publications and fifty courses for students and practitioners across the public sector and civil society. Before academia, Oliver worked in literature, radio, retail, fishing and construction.

Paul Cairney is Professor of Politics and Public Policy, University of Stirling, UK (@Cairneypaul).

• His research interests are in comparative public policy, policy analysis, and policy theories, applied to UK and devolved government policy, and the use of evidence in policy and policymaking

https://paulcairney.wordpress.com/cv/

Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the LSE. He is Director of the Executive Master's in MSc in Behavioural Science. His main research interests are in the measurement of happiness and in changing behaviour through changing the contexts within which people make choices.

• He has over 120 peer-reviewed papers and nearly 30,000 citations. He has worked extensively with policy-makers and private companies. He has featured on various forms of media and is committed to making behavioural science more accessible to a public audience.
• He is author of the Sunday Times best-selling book “Happiness by Design”, and “Happy Ever After”, and the creator and presenter of the Duck - Rabbit podcast, a journey through our polarised culture.

(Bio Credit: LSE Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: Linkedin)

Andrew is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, former Chair of the History Faculty at Cambridge University, Official Historian of the Security Service (MI5), Honorary Air Commodore of 7006 (VR) Intelligence Squadron in the Royal Auxiliary Air Force, Chairman of the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, and former Visiting Professor at Harvard, Toronto and Canberra.

• Andrew served as co-editor of Intelligence and National Security, and a presenter of BBC radio and TV documentaries, including the Radio Four series What If?. His twelve previous books include a number of studies on the use and abuse of secret intelligence in modern history. He is currently a governor of Norwich School where in the 1950s he was a pupil, and has recently retired from his post as President of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

(Bio Credit: Yale Macmillan Center) (Image Credit: Unplash)

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. Allen is the author of : "Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education" (2004), "Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality" (2014), "Education and Equality (2016), and Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A." (2017). She is the co-editor of the award-winning "Education, Justice, and Democracy" (2013, with Rob Reich) and "From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age" (2015, with Jennifer Light). She is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

• She has chaired numerous commission processes and is a lead author on influential policy roadmaps, including "Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion"; "Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience"; "Pandemic Resilience: Getting it Done"; "Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century"; and "Education for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for all Learners K-12".
• Allen is the founding director for the Democratic Knowledge Project Design Studio, which emerged from the Democratic Knowledge Project, a distributed research and action lab at Harvard University. Allen's lab, the Democratic Knowledge Project, worked to identify, strengthen, and disseminate the bodies of knowledge, skills, and capacities that democratic citizens need in order to succeed at operating their democracy. The Design Studio now supports the Democratic Knowledge Project K-12 civic education work, for which Allen is a faculty advisor.

(Bio and Image Credit: Harvard University People Directory)

Historian, broadcaster and film-maker David Olusoga has joined The University of Manchester as a Professor of Public History.

• David, who presented the BBC's landmark series Civilisations in 2018 alongside Simon Schama and Mary Beard, is one of the UK’s foremost historians whose main subject areas are empire, race and slavery. He was made an OBE in the recent New Year’s Honours List.
• After leaving university, Olusoga became a television producer, working on programmes such as Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich, The Lost Pictures of Eugene Smith and Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner. He subsequently became a presenter, beginning in 2014 with The World's War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, about the Indian, African and Asian troops who fought in the First World War, followed by several other documentaries. His most recent TV series include Black and British: A Forgotten History, The World’s War, A House Through Time and the BAFTA award-winning Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners.
• As well as his TV work, David is an award-winning author. His books include Civilizations: Encounters and the Cult of Progress, The World’s War, which won First World War Book of the Year, Black & British: A Forgotten History, which was awarded both the Longman-History Today Trustees Award and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. He also writes for The Observer, The Guardian, The New Statesman and BBC History Magazine.

(Bio and Image Credit: University of Manchester)

Devesh Kapur has a distinguished background in research and academia. He joined the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in July 2018 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, holding the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to his tenure at Penn, he was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. Kapur received the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize, awarded to the best junior faculty at Harvard College and Outstanding Teaching in Political Science by the American Political Science Association, in 2005.

• Kapur’s research has focused on five broad areas that examine the political and institutional determinants of economic development: international financial institutions; political and economic consequences of international and internal migration; the effects of market forces and urbanization on the well-being of socially marginalized groups in India; governance and public institutions; and higher education. His book, "Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India" (Princeton University Press) earned him a 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association, while "The Other One Percent: Indians in American" (with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh) was a Choice Outstanding Title of 2017. His other publications include "The World Bank: Its First Half Century" (with John Lewis and Richard Webb) and "Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs" (co-authored with D. Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad). His latest edited works are "Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education" (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta), "Rethinking Public Institutions in India" (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav), "The Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India" (with Milan Vaishnav) and "Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance" (with Madhav Khosla)
• EDUCATION: BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi; MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota; PhD from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

(Bio Credit: JHU Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: Ideas for India)

Nohria's intellectual interests center on human motivation, leadership, corporate transformation and accountability, and sustainable economic and human performance. He is co-author or co-editor of 16 books. The most recent, "Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice", is a compendium dedicated to advancing research on leadership based on a colloquium he organized during HBS’s centennial celebrations.

• Nohria is also the author of over 50 journal articles, book chapters, cases, working papers, and notes. He sits on the board of directors of Bridgespan and on the board of trustees of Massachusetts General Hospital. In addition, he serves as an advisor to BDT Capital Partners, Piramal Enterprises, and Tata Sons, on the advisory board of Akshaya Patra and ShopX, and as a strategic advisor to Focusing Capital on the Long Term Global (FCLTGlobal). He has been interviewed by ABC, CNN, and NPR; written for Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Financial Times, and Boston Globe; and cited in Business Week, Economist, Financial Times, Fortune, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.
• Prior to joining the Harvard Business School faculty in July 1988, Nohria received his Ph.D. in Management from the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (which honored him as a Distinguished Alumnus in 2007). He was a visiting faculty member at the London Business School in 1996.

(Bio and Image Credit: HBS Faculty Directory)

Khosla’s research interests encompass the areas of internet-enabled collaborative design, collaborating autonomous systems, agent-based architectures for distributed design and embedded control, software composition and reconfigurable software for real-time embedded systems, reconfigurable and distributed robotic systems, integrated design-assembly planning systems and distributed information systems. His research has resulted in three books and more than 350 journal articles and conference and book contributions. He is also the founding director of the Carnegie Mellon CyLab and the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, which pursues interdisciplinary projects.

• Khosla is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Indian Academy of Engineering. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Science. His other awards include the 2012 Light of India Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society. In 2012, he was named as one of the 50 most influential Indian-Americans by SiliconIndia.

(Bio Credit: UCSD Faculty Directory) (Image Credit: CMU Faculty Bio)

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the previous president and chief executive of CPR, is a political scientist who has taught at Harvard University, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and the New York University School of Law. His areas of research include political theory, constitutional law, society and politics in India, governance and political economy, and international affairs.

• Dr Mehta has served on many central government committees, including India’s National Security Advisory Board, the Prime Minister of India’s National Knowledge Commission, and a Supreme Court-appointed committee on elections in Indian universities. Mehta is a prolific writer; he is an editorial consultant to the Indian Express, and his columns have appeared in dailies including the Financial Times, the Telegraph, the International Herald Tribune, and the Hindu. He is also on the editorial boards of many academic journals, including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Democracy, and India and Global Affairs.
• Dr Mehta holds a BA (first class) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford and a PhD in politics from Princeton. He received the 2010 Malcom S. Adishehshiah Award and the 2011 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences - Political Science.

(Bio Credit: Centre for Policy Research) (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Ropafadzo Maphosa is an LLD Candidate at the University of Johannesburg where she completed her LLB and LLM in Human Rights Law (With Distinction). She is currently a researcher at the South African Institute for Advanced Public, Human Rights and International Law, a centre of the University of Johannesburg and a co-founding editor of the law blog, African Law Matters. Her work, which has been published in prestigious law journals, primarily focuses on constitutional law and gender equality.

(Bio and Image Credit: Sunday World)

Vinay Sitapati is associate professor of political science and legal studies at Ashoka University. He has degrees from National Law School Bangalore and Harvard University, and a PhD in politics from Princeton University. He has written for publications as diverse as the Economic & Political Weekly, International New York Times, The Indian Express, Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal, The Hindu, Harvard Crimson, Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, and Seminar.

• His first book was a best-selling biography of Indian prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao: "Half-Lion". It was published in India by Penguin Books and in the United States by Oxford University Press-USA. The book was also translated into Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. The Economist magazine termed it a 'Book of the Year'; it is part of Amazon.com's '100 books to read in a lifetime'.
• His second book, on the "Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi", was published in 2020s.

(Bio and Image Credit: Ashoka University Faculty Directory)