Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, he served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he helped shape the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020.  Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program. He led the World Bank's influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His work includes introducing the concept of the “middle-income trap” to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Mohamad Al-Ississ, a four Harvard degree economist, led Jordan’s fiscal and economic policy during 2016–24 as Minister of Finance, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Minister of State for Economic Affairs, Economic Advisor, and Special Advisor to His Majesty King Abdullah II. Currently a Senator, he has held positions at the Harvard Kennedy School, American University in Cairo, and Boston Consulting Group. He holds a PhD in Public Policy in Economic Development, an MPA in International Development, a Master in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard, and a BA with honors in Economics from Harvard College. He was named “Minister of Finance of the Year 2024” for the Middle East by the Financial Times’ The Banker, secured Jordan’s first sovereign rating upgrades in over two decades, issued $3.7B in Eurobonds, and led IMF programs between 2020–2028. He also served as Jordan’s Governor to the IMF and World Bank, Associate Dean at AUC, and a Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Scholar and lecturer.

Rania A. Al-Mashat is the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). She has been a member of Egypt's cabinet of ministers since 2018, having served as Minister of Planning, Economic Development and International Cooperation, Minister of International Cooperation, and Minister of Tourism. Prior to her ministerial career, she held senior roles at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C., where she served as Advisor to the Chief Economist and Senior Economist. She also held a distinguished tenure at the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), where she played a pivotal role in modernizing the institution's monetary policy strategy, contributing to the formal adoption of an inflation-targeting regime — a cornerstone of the banking sector reform program launched in 2004. In that capacity, she was instrumental in the country's macroeconomic management, leading the design and continuous update of the macroeconomic framework in coordination with other ministries and government entities, and serving as the CBE's liaison with the IMF and Sovereign Rating Agencies.

Lukwesa Burak is a broadcast journalist and presenter who, in August 2016, became the main presenter of BBC Inside Out in the East Midlands. She began her media career at BBC Television Centre in London as a Broadcast Assistant in the Weather Centre, learning the craft of television journalism alongside renowned presenters such as Michael Fish and Bill Giles. Her television break came in Nottingham as a weather presenter on BBC East Midlands Today, where she also presented news bulletins, prompting a transition into news reporting. Lukwesa went on to anchor World News at Sky News for a decade and worked with Al Jazeera English in Doha, as well as eNCA in South Africa, experiences that broadened her perspective on global affairs. She studied Geography and French at the University of Sussex and completed a Master’s degree at the University of Leicester, developing a deep interest in geography and weather shaped by her early life in Africa.

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Gabriel Ulyssea is an Associate Professor and Director of the PhD Program in the Department of Economics at University College London. He is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and IZA, and a Research Affiliate at CEPR and BREAD. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. His research spans economic development and labor economics, with a current focus on informality, migration, and the role of firms in economic development.

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Gaurav Chiplunkar is an Assistant Professor in the Global Economies and Markets group at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, where he joined in the fall of 2019. His research sits at the intersection of development and labor economics, examining how large industrial policies shape firm behavior and how frictions in labor markets constrain job search, recruitment, and hiring practices for both workers and firms. He also investigates how policy reforms and new technologies can help mitigate these frictions, with a broader focus on how labor market frictions, gender disparities, and digitalization shape economic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.

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Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Morduch's research focuses on finance, poverty, and inequality. He is a founder and Executive Director of the NYU Financial Access Initiative. Morduch is the author with Rachel Schneider of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton 2017; project site) and co-author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton 2009) and The Economics of Microfinance (MIT Press 2010). He is co-editor of Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion (MIT Press). Together with Dean Karlan, Morduch is the author of Economics (McGraw-Hill 2024), an empirically-oriented principles of economics text now in its 4th edition.

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Aaditya Mattoo is Director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He specializes in development, trade, and international cooperation, and provides policy advice to governments. Previously, he served as Chief Economist of the East Asia and Pacific Region. He was also Co-Director of the World Development Report 2020 on Global Value Chains and Research Manager, Trade and Integration. Before he joined the Bank, Mr. Mattoo was Economic Counsellor at the World Trade Organization and taught economics at the University of Sussex and Churchill College, Cambridge University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge, and an M.Phil in Economics from the University of Oxford. He has published on development, trade, trade in services, and international trade agreements in academic and other journals and his work has been cited in the Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, and Time Magazine.

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Achyuta Adhvaryu is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the inaugural director of the 21st Century India Center at the University of California, San Diego. He is also the co-founder of Good Business Lab, a global nonprofit dedicated to improving the well-being of low-income workers. Adhvaryu’s research portfolio spans the fields of development economics, organizational economics, labor economics and health economics. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University, and prior to joining UC San Diego he held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan and Yale.

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Kate Orkin is Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government. Kate completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town. She did her MPhil and DPhil at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, finishing in 2015. Kate is an applied microeconomist, working in labour, public, development and behavioural economics. She mainly runs large field experiments in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Africa, developing and testing real-world interventions in partnership with governments and NGOs. Her research studies frictions in urban developing country labour markets that prevent young people from finding work; the role of mental health in labour market decisions; the design of cash transfer and wage subsidy programmes; and the role of aspirations in economic decision-making. 

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Supreet Kaur is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley, specializing in development economics with significant overlap in behavioral and labor economics. Her research pursues two interconnected strands. The first focuses on the functioning of labor markets in developing countries, documenting frictions, studying the causes of unemployment, and examining the impact of inequality on labor productivity. The second explores how psychological forces — such as the limits of human cognition and social norms — affect individual behavior and market equilibria. By applying insights from psychology to economics, her work aims to deepen our understanding of the causes and consequences of poverty. Supreet holds a BS from Columbia University and an MPA/ID and a PhD from Harvard University. She has received some of the most prestigious awards for economists, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award—which is awarded to one young behavioral economist in the world each year.

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Todd Schoellman is a Senior Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a position he has held since 2018. Prior to this role, he served as a Senior Scholar with the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute and held faculty positions as an Assistant Professor of Economics at both Clemson University and Arizona State University. He earned his B.S. in Economics from Ohio State University and his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. His research has been published in leading academic journals, including the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

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Somik V. Lall is Director of Strategy in the Office of the World Bank Group Chief Economist. Lall has held various leadership positions across the World Bank Group including Senior Adviser to the World Bank Group Chief Economist, Director of the 2024 World Development Report on the Middle-Income Trap, Acting Director of DEC Development Policy, Head of the Climate Economics Team, and Global Lead in the Sustainable Development and Infrastructure Vice Presidencies. Lall has directed the World Bank's 2024 World Development Report on the “Middle Income Trap”(opens in a new tab) that examines how middle-income countries can break into the ranks of the wealthiest economies. He is also a co-founder of the Growth Academy, a joint initiative between the World Bank and the University of Chicago to advance joint research programs on economic growth with think tanks in emerging economies.

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Joel Hellman serves as Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a role he has held since July 2015, bringing with him over 25 years of experience working on some of the most complex issues of governance, conflict, and the political economy of development. Prior to joining Georgetown, he served as the World Bank's first Chief Institutional Economist and previously directed the World Bank's Fragile and Conflict Affected States Division. His broader career at the World Bank spanned several additional senior roles, including Director of the Center for Conflict, Security and Development in Nairobi, Kenya — where he led the Bank's engagement with fragile and conflict-affected states worldwide — and Coordinator of the Bank's response to the devastating Asian Tsunami in Indonesia. As a development practitioner, Dean Hellman has worked in nearly 50 countries across four continents. He also served as Senior Political Counselor at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. As a scholar, Dr. Hellman has held faculty positions in political science at Harvard University and Columbia University, with a focus on the politics of economic reform.

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Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, he served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he helped shape the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020.  Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program. He led the World Bank's influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His work includes introducing the concept of the “middle-income trap” to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Richard B. Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University, where he is also Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Professor Freeman's research focuses on the job market for scientists and engineers, the commercialization of scientific innovation, labor markets in China and Korea, the impact of AI and robotics on employment, and employee ownership and labor representation. His many honors include the Mincer Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Society of Labor Economics (2006) and the IZA Prize in Labor Economics (2007).

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Joel Hellman serves as Dean of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a role he has held since July 2015, bringing with him over 25 years of experience working on some of the most complex issues of governance, conflict, and the political economy of development. Prior to joining Georgetown, he served as the World Bank's first Chief Institutional Economist and previously directed the World Bank's Fragile and Conflict Affected States Division. His broader career at the World Bank spanned several additional senior roles, including Director of the Center for Conflict, Security and Development in Nairobi, Kenya — where he led the Bank's engagement with fragile and conflict-affected states worldwide — and Coordinator of the Bank's response to the devastating Asian Tsunami in Indonesia. As a development practitioner, Dean Hellman has worked in nearly 50 countries across four continents. He also served as Senior Political Counselor at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. As a scholar, Dr. Hellman has held faculty positions in political science at Harvard University and Columbia University, with a focus on the politics of economic reform.

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Lukwesa Burak is a broadcast journalist and presenter who, in August 2016, became the main presenter of BBC Inside Out in the East Midlands. She began her media career at BBC Television Centre in London as a Broadcast Assistant in the Weather Centre, learning the craft of television journalism alongside renowned presenters such as Michael Fish and Bill Giles. Her television break came in Nottingham as a weather presenter on BBC East Midlands Today, where she also presented news bulletins, prompting a transition into news reporting. Lukwesa went on to anchor World News at Sky News for a decade and worked with Al Jazeera English in Doha, as well as eNCA in South Africa, experiences that broadened her perspective on global affairs. She studied Geography and French at the University of Sussex and completed a Master’s degree at the University of Leicester, developing a deep interest in geography and weather shaped by her early life in Africa.

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Dean Spears is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also an affiliate of the Population Research Center, the South Asia Institute, and Innovations for Peace and Development. An economic demographer and development economist, his research spans child health, growth, and survival — with a particular focus on India — as well as the environment, air pollution, climate change, and the population dimensions of social well-being. Beyond UT-Austin, he is a founding Executive Director of r.i.c.e. (Research Institute for Compassionate Economics) and has served as a Visiting Economist at the Economics and Planning Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi. He is further affiliated with IZA and the Climate Futures Initiative at Princeton University. He is the co-author of After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People — a compelling examination of what it means for humanity's future if the defining challenge is not too many people on a crowded planet, but too few to sustain the progress the world needs.

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Steven Radelet holds the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development and is Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Development at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He served as the Director of the Master of Global Human Development Program at SFS from 2014 to 2025. His work focuses on economic growth, foreign aid, debt, and financial crises, primarily in Africa and Asia. Professor Radelet joined the Georgetown faculty in 2012 after serving as Chief Economist of USAID and Senior Adviser for Development for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He previously served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (1999-2002). He served as an economic advisor to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia from 2006-2009 and again from 2013-2017, and also was an advisor to President Joyce Banda of Malawi. He spent twelve years with the Harvard Institute for International Development, while teaching in both the Harvard economics department and Kennedy School of Government. While with HIID, he spent four years as resident adviser to the Ministry of Finance in Jakarta, Indonesia, and two years with the Ministry of Finance and Trade in The Gambia. He holds Ph.D. and master's degrees in public policy from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Central Michigan University.

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Emma Wiles is the Isabel Anderson Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. She is also a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Faculty Fellow at BU's Digital Business Institute. Her research focuses on the application of artificial intelligence in labor markets and the design of online platforms. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including Management Science, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. Emma received her Ph.D. from MIT Sloan in 2024. Her dissertation, "Artificial Intelligence and Labor Market Matching," was awarded the University of Padua's International PhD Thesis Award in Artificial Intelligence in Entrepreneurship and Management (AIEM).

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David McKenzie is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group, Prosperity Research Program. He received his B.Com.(Hons)/B.A. from the University of Auckland, New Zealand and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. Prior to joining the World Bank, he spent four years as an assistant professor of Economics at Stanford University. His main research is on migration, enterprise development, and methodology for use with developing country data. He has published more than 150 articles in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Economic Journal, American Economic Journal: Applied Micro, Journal of Econometrics, and all leading development journals. He is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and Migration Studies. He is also a co-founder and regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.

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Heesung Kim is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the PhD program, he worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. His research lies at the intersection of labor and development economics, with an emphasis on market and behavioral frictions shaping job search, hiring, and worker decision-making. 

Garima Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. She earned her PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2023. Her research lies at the intersection of development and labor economics, with a focus on how labor markets operate in developing countries. She studies the effects of market power on labor market outcomes and examines the role of social protection policies in improving the welfare of low-income populations.

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Jillian Berk is an economist and Vice President of Education and Employment at Mathematica, where she oversees a portfolio of research and evidence-building activities focused on education, workforce development, and labor market outcomes. She directs major studies for the U.S. Department of Labor and other federal agencies on workforce programs, youth and adult career pathways, and approaches to supporting employment and economic mobility among individuals facing barriers to work. Berk has published research in peer-reviewed journals including Evaluation Review, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Research in Economics. She earned her Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University.

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Karen Eggleston is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Asia Health Policy Program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at FSI. She is also a Fellow with the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Her research focuses on government and market roles in the health sector and Asia health policy, especially in China, India, Japan, and Korea; healthcare productivity; and the economics of the demographic transition. Eggleston earned her PhD in public policy from Harvard University and has MA degrees in economics and Asian studies from the University of Hawaii and a BA in Asian studies summa cum laude (valedictorian) from Dartmouth College. Eggleston studied in China for two years and was a Fulbright scholar in Korea. She served on the Strategic Technical Advisory Committee for the Asia Pacific Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and has been a consultant to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the WHO regarding health system reforms in the PRC.

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Charles Udomsaph is a Teaching Professor in the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he teaches statistics and econometrics for the Global Human Development Program and leads a Stata practicum for undergraduates. Since 2003, he has served as a consultant for the World Bank, working on projects across Africa and the Middle East and North Africa regions. His experience spans enterprise survey implementation in Southeast Asia to capacity-building initiatives in Rwanda and Jordan. His current research develops a novel methodology to measure AI adoption internationally at scale and examines how conflict affects innovation and job creation in Africa and West Asia. Professor Udomsaph earned both his BSFS and MSFS degrees from Georgetown University and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Achyuta Adhvaryu is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy and the inaugural director of the 21st Century India Center at the University of California, San Diego. He is also the co-founder of Good Business Lab, a global nonprofit dedicated to improving the well-being of low-income workers. Adhvaryu’s research portfolio spans the fields of development economics, organizational economics, labor economics and health economics. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University, and prior to joining UC San Diego he held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan and Yale.

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Lisa Singh is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences and is a Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. She is also the Director of the Massive Data Institute (MDI) in the McCourt School of Public Policy. She is affiliated with the Institute for the Study of International Migration and the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, and serves on the Technology and Society Steering Committee. She has authored/co-authored over 100 peer reviewed publications and book chapters related to data-centric computing, i.e. data mining, data privacy, and data science, and is the co-author of Words That Matter: How News and Social Media Shaped the 2016 Presidential Election. Her work has been featured in different media outlets, including the CNN, the Washington Post, and NPR. Dr. Singh is also involved in different initiatives focused on increasing participation of women in computing and integrating computational thinking into K-12 curricula, including helping to increase percentage of women in computer science at Georgetown. Dr. Singh received her B.S.E. from Duke University and her M.S. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

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Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, he served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he helped shape the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020.  Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program. He led the World Bank's influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His work includes introducing the concept of the “middle-income trap” to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. The 2024 World Development Report, prepared with his guidance, highlights strategies for countries to escape the middle-income trap—by adopting modern technologies and driving innovation.

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Thomas Banchoff is Vice President for Global Engagement at Georgetown University. He also serves as Professor in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service and as Director of Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, which he founded in 2006. Banchoff's scholarship centers on religious and ethical issues in world politics. His books include The Jesuits and Globalization: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Challenges, co-edited with Jose Casanova (2016); Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies (2011); and, as editor, Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (2008), and Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2007). Banchoff received his BA from Yale in 1986 (summa cum laude), MA from the University of Bonn in 1988, and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton in 1993. 

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