Dr. Esther Duflo is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a co-founder of J-PAL. In her research, she seeks to understand the economic lives of the poor, with the aim to help design and evaluate social policies. She received 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Professor Esther Duflo co-authored ‘Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty’, which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2011 and the recently wrote Good Economics for Hard Times. Her first degrees were in history and economics from Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and her Ph.D. is in Economics from MIT.

Dr. Ali Cheema serves as the Director at MHRC and is an Associate Professor of Economics at LUMS. He is a Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS Pakistan, co-founder of CERP, and a co-lead academic of the IGC’s Pakistan programme. His areas of research include development, gender, political economy and local governance. His work has been accepted in leading journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy, Science, and the American Political Science Review. He holds a PhD in Economics from Cambridge, an MPhil in Economics and Politics from Cambridge, a BA hons in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Dr. Farah Said is an Assistant Professor at LUMS. Her research focuses on development economics, applied microeconomics, behavioral economics, and gender. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Lahore School of Economics, as well as a postgraduate degree in Financial Economics (MSc, University of Oxford).