EPoD People

Rohini Pande, EPoD Co-Director, is Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy. Prior to joining the Kennedy School she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She has taught at Yale University, MIT, and Columbia. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries. A Rhodes Scholar, she is the recipient of several NSF grants, the Russell Sage Presidential Award (with Lena Edlund), and the Royal Economic Society Junior Research Fellowship. She holds a PhD and M.Sc in Economics from the London School of Economics, an MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, and a BA in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi University. [Email | HKS Website | Personal Website]

Asim Khwaja, EPoD Co-Director, is Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. His areas of interest include economic development, corporate finance, education, political economy, industrial organization, contract theory, mechanism design, and computational economics. Combining fieldwork, micro-level empirical analysis, and theory, his recent work ranges from understanding political and informational constraints in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries. He received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard. A Pakistani citizen, Khwaja was born in London, U.K., lived for eight years in Kano, Nigeria, the next eight in Lahore, Pakistan, and the last sixteen years in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He continues to enjoy interacting with people around the globe. [Email | HKS Website | Personal Website | Entrepreneurial Finance Lab]

Rema Hanna is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy. She is a research fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at the Center for International Development. Her fields of interest include development and environmental economics. Her development work mostly focuses on India and Indonesia. Her current research focuses on understanding how discrimination influences public service provision and education. She received a BS in Public Policy from Cornell and a PhD in economics from MIT. [Email | HKS Website]

Amitabh Chandra is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany, and at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His current research focuses on the effect of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act on labor markets, the role of medical malpractice litigation on the delivery of health care, and the economics of neonatal health and cardiovascular care. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the journal Economics Letters. He has been a faculty member at Dartmouth and MIT, and has been a consultant to the National Academy of Science, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the RAND Corporation. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award and is the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award. [HKS Website | Personal Website]

David Yanagizawa-Drott  is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research interests include economic development and political economy, with special focus on civil conflict, health, information and mass media. He has explored issues such as the impact of hate propaganda on violence during the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, the relationship between the government and the mass media, and how price information affects the functioning of agricultural markets in developing countries. He is currently conducting randomized evaluations in Uganda that investigate innovative ways to solve part of the healthcare service delivery problem, as well as the problem of fake and substandard medicines in developing countries. Born in Sweden, he holds a M.Sc in Economics from University of Gothenburg and a PhD in Economics from Stockholm University. [Email | HKS Website]

Ryan Sheely is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy. During the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 academic years, he will also be a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at the Center for International Development. His current research focuses on public goods provision and state capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted randomized evaluations and extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork in several pastoralist communities in the Laikipia Region of Kenya. He is also the co-founder of the SAFI Project, a nonprofit organization that coordinates waste management and recycling activities in northern Kenya. His research has been supported by the International Livestock Research Institute, the Institute for Social and Policy Studies, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. He holds a BA in ethics, politics, and economics from Yale University, and a PhD in political science, also from Yale. [Email | HKS Website]

Monica Singhal is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her fields of interest include public finance and development, with a particular focus on issues related to taxation, redistribution, and fiscal federalism. Her current research focuses on how developing countries can strengthen tax revenue collection and build state capacity. Ongoing projects in Bangladesh, India, and Ecuador examine how tax authorities can use policy tools such as social recognition and information technology to improve compliance as well as how taxation affects individual and firm behavior. She is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a member of the International Growth Centre (IGC). She received her BA and PhD from Harvard University. [Email | HKS Website | Personal Website]

Deanna Ford is the Associate Director of Evidence for Policy Design. Prior to joining CID, Deanna was based in Nicaragua leading the Nica HOPE Project of Fabretto Children’s Foundation as the Project Director and founder. Deanna completed her Master of Public Policy at Georgetown University in 2007, where she focused on issues in international development, education and SME/microfinance. During school, she also worked as a consultant for Agora Partnerships, an organization fostering business development in Nicaragua, and as a Research Fellow at the Center for Research on Children in the U.S. Previously, she worked for two years as a research assistant at the International Monetary Fund. Deanna graduated in 2003 from Princeton University with a degree in Economics and Latin American Studies. [E-mail]

Samura Atallah is a Research/Faculty assistant for professors Rema Hanna and Amitabh Chandra. Samura graduated in 2011 from Brown University where she received a B.A. in International Relations with honors. Her topical focus was global security, regionally focusing on the Middle East. She wrote her honors thesis on the relationship between education and the reproduction of global Salafi jihad in Egypt, where she conducted her fieldwork. At Brown, she founded Bridge & Lead (B&L), a social student organization that promotes internationalization and intergroup dialogue. In summer 2010, she worked as a Research Assistant at Stockholm University Linnaeus Center for Integration Studies, where she carried out fieldwork with Iraqi refugees in Sweden. During school, she worked as a reporter for the Watson Institute for International Studies. She studied at the American University in Cairo before transferring to Brown. From 2007 to 2009, she volunteered with Alashanek Ya Balady [For You My Country], a developmental organization based in Egypt. Samura is natively fluent in Arabic. [Email]

Sarah Bishop is a Research Fellow with Professor Rema Hanna. She recently completed a systematic review of anti-corruption strategies in developing countries for DFID and is currently analyzing the effectiveness of smokeless stoves on health outcomes in a rural state of India. Before working at CID, Sarah completed her Master in International Affairs at Columbia University with a focus on the evaluation of economic development strategies. During graduate school she interned in Mexico with Innovations for Poverty Action on a project examining the effectiveness of microfinance. Prior to graduate school, Sarah spent two years conducting education and health related program evaluations at OMNI, a social science research institute in Denver, Colorado. In 2006, she supported labor economics research for two different organizations in Santiago, Chile. Sarah graduated from the University of Maine, Orono in 2004 with degrees in Spanish and International Affairs/Economics. [E-mail]

Annalise Blum is a research and faculty assistant to Professors David Yanagizawa-Drott and Ryan Sheely. In June 2010, she graduated from Stanford University in environmental engineering with a minor in political science. She spent the following year working on a hand-hygiene research project in Kibera, Kenya and a water and sanitation needs assessment in migrant schools in Mae Sot, Thailand. Annalise has also worked on research projects in Ecuador and Tanzania. [Email]

Max Bode is a Research Fellow for Professors Rohini Pande and Erica Field. Prior to joining the EPod, he received a Master’s degree in International Trade, Finance and Development from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). He conducted his undergraduate studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. In Maastricht he worked as a TA in the two introductory statistics, econometrics and mathematical economics courses and was the President of the student’s economics society. Max’s field experience in development projects includes the coordination of and teaching in an after-school program in a South African township and participation in development projects in Kenya and Thailand. [Email]

Nathan Cutler is a Research Fellow for Professors Rohini Pande and Erica Field. Nathan earned a Masters in International and Development Economics from the University of San Francisco in 2011 as well as graduating with honors from the University of California, Davis in economics and international relations in 2006. He wrote his master’s thesis on the role of social networks as substitutes for formal micro-health insurance in Cambodia. Prior to joining EPod he acted as a Kiva Fellow in Vietnam, worked for a San Francisco start-up and was a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch. [Email]

Natalie Sanchez is a Research Fellow with Professor Asim Khwaja. She is working to develop a curriculum and framework for integrating negotiation and conflict resolution into EPod training and policy activities. While pursuing her Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, she worked with the Kennedy Negotiation Project to develop negotiation and conflict resolution curriculum for graduate, executive, and non-governmental organizations. This includes a new pedagogy and coaching model that seeks to convert emotional intelligence into negotiation leverage. She also serves as a graduate mentor for the Center for Public Leadership’s Latino Leadership Initiative which annually serves up to 40 of the nation’s most promising Latino undergraduates to inspire and enhance their capacity to be the next generation of leaders. She received her B.A. with honors in Political Science from Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. [Email]

Gabriel Tourek is a Research Fellow for Professors Asim Khwaja and Rema Hanna. Gabriel graduated in 2010 from the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. Prior to joining EPod Gabriel served as a project associate with Innovations for Poverty Action in Ghana. [Email]