Dr. Heather Huntington serves as an Associate Director of DevLab@Penn. Her research interests include land tenure, land administration, natural resource management, as well as governance and accountability. Dr. Huntington has managed research and evaluation portfolios for USAID and MCC, including the design and implementation of impact and performance evaluations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Dr. Grossman is a professor at the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is in applied political economy, with a substantive focus on governance, migration and forced displacement, human trafficking, and conflict processes, (mostly) in the context of developing countries. He is the founder and co-director of Penn’s Development Research Initiative (PDRI) and he is affiliated with DevLab@Penn.

Nicholas Sambanis is a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Director of the Identity & Conflict Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on conflict processes with a focus on civil wars and other forms of inter-group conflict. Topics of current interest are the effects of external intervention on peace-building after ethnic war; the analysis of violent escalation of separatist movements; conflict between native and immigrant populations; and strategies to mitigate bias and discrimination against minority groups. He studies these questions with a focus on the connection between identity politics and conflict processes drawing on social psychology, behavioral economics, and the comparative politics and international relations literatures in political science. Ongoing projects include research on the long-term legacies of violence exposure; the sources of ethnic and national identification among minority groups; the effects of integrative institutions in overcoming ethnic conflict; and on strategies to reduce bias and discrimination toward immigrants and refugees.

Dr. Wibbels’ research focuses on decentralized governance, migration, security, big data approaches to civic space, and other areas of political economy. He has worked with USAID’s DRG Centre, USAID mission officers, AidData, RTI International, the World Bank and others on projects around the world.