Michael Woolcock

Lead Social Development Specialist
World Bank’s Development Research Group

Michael Woolcock is Lead Social Development Specialist with the World Bank’s Development Research Group, and a (part-time) Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of over 75 journal articles and chapters, as well as eight books, most recently ‘Building State Capability: Evidence, Analysis, Action’ (forthcoming with Oxford University Press; with Matt Andrews and Lant Pritchett). He is a co-founder of the World Bank’s global ‘Justice for the Poor’ initiative (2004); from 2006-2009 he was the founding Research Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester; and in 2012 co-founded the ‘Building State Capability’ program at Harvard’s Center for International Development. In 2012 he was a co-recipient of the ‘best book’ prize, and in 2014 the ‘best article’ prize, from the American Sociological Association’s section on International Development. He is currently based in Malaysia, helping establish the World Bank’s first Knowledge and Research Hub. He is on the editorial board of numerous journals, and is the Asia-Pacific representative on the Scientific Advisory Committee of UNESCO’s largest research program (Management of Social Transformations). An Australian national, he has an MA and PhD in comparative-historical sociology from Brown University.

Dean Karlan

Professor of Economics
Yale University

Dean Karlan is a Professor of Economics at Yale University and President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems. He is on the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. As a social entrepreneur Karlan is co-Founder of stickK.com, a website that uses lessons from behavioral economics to help people reach personal goals. In 2015, Karlan founded ImpactMatters, a nonprofit dedicated to producing impact audits, which assesses whether an organization uses and produces appropriate evidence of impact.

Karlan received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded distinguished alumni awards from the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business and the Duke University Talent Identification Program. In 2011 he co-authored More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty. His education includes a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.

Stefan Koeberle

Director for Strategy, Risk and Results
World Bank

Dr. Stefan G. Koeberle is the Director for Strategy, Risk and Results, Operations Policy and Country Services of the World Bank since August, 2013. Dr. Koeberle previously held a variety of positions at the World Bank including: Country Director for Indonesia, Director, Strategy and Operations in the Latin America and Caribbean Region and Director, Operations Services in Latin America. Since joining the World Bank in 1993, Dr. Koeberle has worked in a variety of countries and regions, including assignments in Thailand, Vietnam and Lao PDR. Prior to joining the World Bank, Dr. Koeberle worked as a post-graduate fellow at the German Development Institute in Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge University. He has published a number of articles and several books on competitiveness, conditionality and budget support.

Maria González de Asis

Head of the Science of Delivery team
Global Delivery Initiative

Maria González de Asis is the Head of the Science of Delivery team and the Global Delivery Initiative at the World Bank. She has been at the World Bank since 1997, where she worked in operations in different regions focusing on public sector reforms; managing anticorruption programs, disseminating emerging best practice in governance and anti-corruption worldwide, leading the area of Legal and Judicial Reform Learning Programs and the sectoral work and researching and advising countries on governance and development. Over the past years she has pioneered lending and non-lending operations and capacity building approaches for governance in different countries. Ms. González is a frequent speaker on governance issues in different fora (Stanford University, Kennedy School at Harvard, Georgetown University, among others). Ms.González de Asis has a Ph.D. in Law from the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, and a M.P.P. from Georgetown University. Before joining the World Bank, she worked at Transparency International in Washington DC, Berlin and Peru, and for the Spanish Lawyer Firm Abogados Asociados.

Fay Twersky

Senior Director
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Fay Twersky is Director of the Effective Philanthropy Group at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She oversees five functions including cross-foundation strategy support, evaluation and organization learning as well as grantmaking in support of organizational effectiveness and a strong philanthropic sector. Twersky spent 2010–2011 working in Jerusalem, advising Yad Hanadiv (the Rothschild Family Foundation).

Twersky served for four years as Director and member of the leadership team of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, designing and developing the Impact Planning & Improvement division. She was also a founding principal of BTW – Informing Change, a strategic consulting firm.

Twersky has authored many articles and reports. Recently, she published “The Artful Juggler,” in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on what it takes to be a successful Foundation Chief Executive Officer. She was principal author of Listening to Those Who Matter Most, the Beneficiaries and A Guide to Actionable Measurement. Twersky is a member of the board of directors for The Center for Effective Philanthropy and the UBS Optimus Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland. She serve on the Curriculum Advisory Committee for Philanthropy University, a newly launched Massive Open Online Course offered in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, Twersky holds two bachelor’s degrees in Rhetoric and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s degree in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Vijayendra Rao

Lead Economist, Development Research Group
Social Observatory, The World Bank

Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He heads the Social Observatory, a multi-disciplinary approach to build adaptive learning in large-scale participatory projects. He integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology and political science to study the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries. Dr. Rao has published on a variety of subjects that include dowries and domestic violence in India, the economics of celebrations, sex work in Calcutta, participatory development, village democracy and deliberation, and inter-disciplinary approaches to public policy. He co-edited Culture and Public Action, and History, Historians and Development Policy, and co-authored the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development. Most recently, with Ghazala Mansuri, he co-authored the World Bank’s Policy Research Report on Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?

Tim Ogden

Managing Director
Financial Access Initiative

Tim Ogden is managing director of the Financial Access Initiative, a research center housed at NYU-Wagner and executive partner at Sona Partners, a thought leadership communications firm. He is co-author of Toyota Under Fire, and author of the forthcoming Experimental Conversations, a collection of interviews with economists about the use of randomized control trials in development economics and policy. He has developed and edited more than 20 books, including award-winning business books on lean business practices and innovation. Tim is a senior fellow of the Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program, a contributing editor for Alliance Magazine, and serves on the board of GiveWell.

Basit Chaudhry

Founder and CEO
Tuple Health

Dr. Basit Chaudhry is an internal medicine physician and medical technologist whose expertise focuses on health care payment, clinical service redesign, and the use of data analytics to improve clinical and financial performance in health care. He is the founder and CEO of Tuple Health, which works with providers, payers, and purchasers to transition to new models for value-based payment and collaborative, population health. Prior to starting Tuple Health, Dr. Chaudhry was a medical scientist at IBM Research where his work focused on using data analytics and information technology to drive innovation in health care. In addition to technology development, Dr. Chaudhry worked on developing IBM’s private and public-sector business strategies for the healthcare industry.

After finishing his medical training in internal medicine, Dr. Chaudhry completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars program at UCLA, earning a Ph.D focused on biomedical informatics and health services research. He has provided expertise to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine and served on a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-authoring its policy report, “Realizing the Full Potential of Health Information Technology.”

Samir K. Doshi

Senior Scientist
USAID Global Development Lab

Samir K. Doshi is a Senior Scientist at USAID’s Global Development Lab. Samir leads the Real-Time Data for Adaptive Management initiative, with a focus on how local communities can use digital technologies in complex environments to better monitor, evaluate, learn and adapt to emergent and dynamic situations. Samir also supports USAID’s work on the Ebola response and the strengthening of health systems in West Africa.

Samir has held teaching and research appointments at the University of Cambridge, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Queen’s University and the University of Vermont. He was also a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar in India focusing on grassroots innovations and sustainable development. Samir was a fellow of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Institute for Advanced Study, the Santa Fe Institute, the Environmental Leadership Program and other institutions. Prior to his academic career, Samir worked as an engineer for local organizations on sustainable development projects in indigenous communities around the world. His Ph.D. research specialized in Systems Ecology, and his MS and BS focus was in Development Economics and Computer Systems Engineering, respectively.

Erin Holve

Senior Director
AcademyHealth

Erin Holve, Ph.D. M.P.H. M.P.P is a senior director at AcademyHealth where she leads AcademyHealth’s work on research resources for the field of health services and policy research. Dr. Holve directs several projects related to patient-centered outcomes research, quality improvement and health system analytics, including serving as principal investigator of an AHRQ-funded grant, the Electronic Data Methods (EDM) Forum. She is founding editor and editor-in-chief of AcademyHealth’s open access peer-reviewed journal, eGEMs (Generating Evidence & Methods to improve patient outcomes) and is a senior advisor on numerous national-level programs to advance the goals of learning health systems. She holds a Ph.D in Health Services Research from Johns Hopkins University and Masters’ degrees in public health and public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.

David Evans

Senior Economist
World Bank

David Evans is a Senior Economist in the Chief Economist’s Office for the Africa Region of the World Bank. He coordinates impact evaluation work across sectors for the Africa Region. In the past, he worked as Senior Economist in the Human Development Department in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region of the World Bank, and as an economist designing and implementing impact evaluations in Africa. He has designed and implemented impact evaluations in agriculture, early child development, education, governance, health, and social protection, in Brazil, the Gambia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. He coordinated the World Bank’s efforts to estimate the economic impact of the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-2015. He has published in Demography, Economic Development and Cultural Change, the Lancet, the Lancet Global Health, and World Development. He teaches economic development at the Pardee RAND Graduate School of Public Policy, and he holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Kavita Patel

Nonresident Senior Fellow
Brookings Institution

Kavita Patel is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Previously, Dr. Patel was managing director of clinical transformation at the Center for Health Policy and lead research on delivery system reform, health care financing, physician payment reform, and healthcare workforce development. She is a previous Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar, and while at Brookings, she will return to providing clinical care as an internal medicine practitioner.

Dr. Patel is also a practicing primary care internist at Johns Hopkins Medicine. She also served in the Obama Administration as director of policy for the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement in the White House. As a senior aide to Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s senior advisor, Dr. Patel played a critical role in policy development and evaluation of policy initiatives connected to health reform, financial regulatory reform, and economic recovery issues. In addition, Dr. Patel has a deep understanding of Capitol Hill from her time spent on the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s staff.

Caroline Fiennes

Founder and Director
Giving Evidence
@carolinefiennes

Caroline Fiennes is one of the few people whose work has appeared in both The Lancet and OK! Magazine. She is a leading advocate and campaigner for effective philanthropy, in which she has worked for twelve years. She serves on boards of: Charity Navigator; The Cochrane Collaboration (leading global research house at the centre of evidence-based medicine); and the Center for Effective Philanthropy (US philanthropy think-tank & research house). She works with Innovations for Poverty Action and formerly with J-PAL at MIT. A former award-winning charity CEO herself, she founded Giving Evidence which advises donors of various descriptions and in many countries about effective giving, and conducts research to improve it. Caroline speaks and writes extensively about the need for and barriers to effective giving, e.g., in the Financial Times, Forbes, The Economist, BBC Radio 4, Freakonomics, the Daily Mail, the philanthropy sector press. Her book It Ain’t What You Give, It’s the Way That You Give It is dedicated to all those who miss out because donors make the wrong call, and was described in the press as “indispensable… relentlessly logical… engaging, informative, irreverent … long overdue… Thank goodness somebody’s finally written this book… a tour de force”. Caroline has taught about effective giving at Oxford, Cambridge and Yale. She holds a surprisingly useful degree in physics and philosophy.

Fredrik Galtung

President and co-founder
Integrity Action

Fredrik Galtung is the president and co-founder of Integrity Action, an NGO that helps communities fix failing development projects. Over the past 20 years, Fredrik has consulted on strategic corruption control in more than forty countries, working with governments, international organisations (Council of Europe, World Bank, UN secretariat, UNDP, UNESCO, Unicef, UN Office of Drugs and Crime, etc.), several companies, foundations and governments and development agencies. Fredrik began his international career as the founding staff member and Head of Research of Transparency International (TI), the world’s first global anti-corruption NGO, with national chapters in some 100 countries. Fredrik is the founder of the Integrity Education Network which started as a joint project with the Central European University. IEN comprises more than 400 universities in 60 countries intent on developing an effective teaching, training and research programme in the field of public integrity. He started the Network for Integrity in Reconstruction, a group of NGOs and policy makers from post-war countries who address the integrity and corruption challenges of reconstruction. Fredrik is an Ashoka Fellow in recognition of his role as a social entrepreneur.

Alison Hemberger

Markets and Learning Advisor
Mercy Corps

Alison Hemberger is Mercy Corps’ Markets and Learning Advisor, where she guides agency efforts to support adaptive management and advises on market systems interventions. Alison serves on the leadership team for Mercy Corps ADAPT partnership with IRC, aimed at driving institutional and program-level change using evidence of adaptive programming. Prior to her current role, Alison was Mercy Corps Liberia’s Director of Results Management where she was responsible for leading the team’s approach to monitoring and learning in market development programming. Before joining Mercy Corps, Alison worked across sub-Saharan Africa on projects to integrate M&E design with program strategy and policy, including work with Skoll Foundation, USAID, Technoserve, CARE, and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Alison holds a Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School with a focus on Political and Economic Development.

Dave Algoso

Freelance Consultant
algoso.org

Dave Algoso is a manager, facilitator, and writer working as a freelance consultant in the international development and social impact sectors. Previously, as Managing Director at Reboot, he led a variety of governance and civil society projects for clients at the World Bank, USAID, and elsewhere. While working on peacebuilding programs with Mercy Corps, he launched a microgrants fund supporting youth groups in Kenya. His professional experience weaves across research and evaluation, political campaign organizing and strategy consulting, program design and organizational development. Dave also writes on aid, development, politics, and related issues on his blog (Praxis), on Twitter (@dalgoso), and elsewhere.

Dennis Whittle

Co-Founder and Executive Director
Feedback Labs
@DennisWhittle

Dennis Whittle’s adolescence was spent working as a newspaper delivery boy, dishwasher, busboy, ice cream scooper, mechanics assistant at a used car dealership, clerk in a bookstore, and maintenance assistant scraping the paint off wooden bleachers at a football stadium.

Dennis is co-founder and director of Feedback Labs. Previously, he worked as Lead Economist and Senior Partner at the World Bank, where his team created Innovation and Development Marketplaces which have been replicated in over 100 countries by the World Bank and other aid agencies, foundations, and impact investors. He also co-founded GlobalGiving, the first global crowdfunding + crowdsourcing website, where he was CEO from 2000-2010. He has since served as Executive Chairman of Ashoka Changemakers, Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development, Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University, Robin Richards Donohoe Professor of the Practice and Entrepreneur in Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill, and Board Director of Internews.

During his tenure at the World Bank from 1986-2000, Dennis lived and/or worked for many years in Indonesia and Russia. In 1984-85, Dennis worked for the Asian Development Bank and USAID in the Philippines, where he was an extra in the Chuck Norris film, Missing in Action. He has a BA in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was Morehead Scholar, and an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University.

Panthea Lee

Principal
Reboot

Panthea Lee is Reboot’s Principal and lead designer, focused on the practical applications of ethnography, design, and systems thinking in delivering effective international development and governance programs. She oversees all aspects of the program management process, including research, design, implementation, and evaluation.

Panthea has directed over $10 million of programming in over 20 countries, primarily across Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Her experience includes work in open government, civic innovation, public sector reform, ICT4D, education, and public health. She is a frequent leader of co-creation efforts that bridge the gap between government, civil society, communities, and the private sector.

Prior to co-founding Reboot, Panthea worked to leverage the use of technology in international development with UNICEF Innovation. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, Al Jazeera, MIT Innovations Journal, Touchpoint: The Journal of Service Design, and Fast Company. She has lectured at Columbia, Harvard, NYU, and the School of Visual Arts, and is a graduate of McGill University.