PENN

| Personnel | Consultants |

Researchers affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania are divided into two categories: Personnel and Consultants.

Personnel

Jere R. Behrman  |  jbehrman@econ.upenn.edu
Jere R. Behrman (Ph.D. in Economics, MIT, 1966) is the WR Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics and Sociology and Research Associate of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is PI on the University of Pennsylvania component of the GCC project consortium. His research is in empirical micro economics, economic development, early childhood development, labor economics, human resources (education, training, health, nutrition), economic demography, household behaviors, life-cycle and intergenerational relations and policy evaluation. He has published over 350 professional articles (primarily in leading general and field economic journals, also in leading demographic, sociology, nutritional and biomedical journals) and 33 books. He has been a research consultant with a number of international organizations, involved in professional research or lecturing in over 40 countries, a principal investigator on over 75 research projects and received a number of honors for his research, including being selected a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a 40th Anniversary Fulbright Fellow, the 2008 biennial Carlos Diaz-Alejandro Prize for outstanding research contributions to Latin America, a 2011 Doctor Honoris Causa from the University de Chile, and a member of the U.S. National Institutes of Child Health and Development (NICHD) Advisory Council.
Ian M. Bennett ian.bennett@uphs.upenn.edu
Dr. Bennett is a family physician providing full spectrum primary care including obstetric, pediatric and general adult health care. He also conducts health services research in the implementation of evidence based care models for perinatal depression in the US and in low and middle income countries. He is the primary investigator or co-investigator of multiple grants funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, as well as foundations (WK Kellog Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) investigating perinatal depression care in low income race/ethnic minority populations in diverse geographic settings. He has particular expertise in the delivery of health services within safety net primary care sites and is the PI of a three year prospective study of the implementation of team based care for perinatal depression in four FQHCs in southcentral and southeast Pennsylvania. He is currently a fellow in the Implementation Research Institute funded by the NIMH at Washington University with a project focus on implementing collaborative care models for perinatal depression in FQHCs. He is collaborating with the School of Public Health at the Universidad Peruano Cayetano Heredia in Lima Peru to implement an electronic medical record and mHealth system (Kuysi-Red) to support perinatal depression care in public health centers of Callao, Peru.
Angela Lee Duckworth  |  aduckworth@characterlab.org
Dr. Angela Lee Duckworth is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Angela studies non-IQ competencies, including self-control and grit, which predict achievement. Prior to her career in research, Angela founded a non-profit summer school for low-income children which won the Better Government Award for the state of Massachusetts and was profiled as a Harvard Kennedy School case study. Angela has also been a McKinsey management consultant and, for five years, a math teacher in the public schools of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York City.
Emily Hannum  |  hannumem@soc.upenn.edu
Emily Hannum (consultant, Penn grant) earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1998. She is Associate Professor of Sociology and Education and Graduate Chair in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also affiliated with the Population Studies Center and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. Her research interests include education, global development, gender and ethnic stratification, poverty, and child welfare. She is a principal investigator on the Gansu Survey of Children and Families, a collaborative, longitudinal study of children in rural northwest China that seeks to illuminate sources of upward mobility among children living in some of China’s poorest communities, and is a member of a new international research project on social and economic welfare in China’s western minority regions. She serves on the international advisory board for the China General Social Survey. Recent papers include “Poverty and Proximate Barriers to Learning: Vision Deficiencies, Vision Correction and Educational Outcomes in Rural Northwest China” (with Yuping Zhang, 2012, World Development) and “Why are Returns to Education Higher for Women than for Men in Urban China?” (with Yuping Zhang and Meiyan Wang, forthcoming, China Quarterly).
Jessica Y. Ho yjho@sas.upenn.edu
Jessica Y. Ho is a Ph.D. candidate in Demography and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the summer of 2013, she will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Duke University Population Research Institute and the Department of Sociology. She is a team member on the University of Pennsylvania component of the GCC project consortium. Her research interests include health over the life course in developing countries, life expectancy differentials among developed countries, and health disparities within the United States. Her research has been published in venues including Demography, Population and Development Review, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, and Health Affairs. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship recipient and has consulted for the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Understanding International Health Differences in High-Income Countries.
Hans-Peter Kohler  |  hpkohler@pop.upenn.edu
Hans-Peter Kohler (Ph.D, University of California at Berkeley,1997) is an economic demographer whose current research focuses on health and health-related behaviors in developing and developed countries. A key characteristic of his research is the attempt to integrate demographic, economic, sociological and biological approaches in empirical and theoretical models of demographic behavior. In his prior work, Kohler has been investigating the role of social and sexual networks for HIV risk perceptions and HIV infection risks, the causal effects of education on health, the consequences of learning one’s HIV status on risky behaviors using randomized experiments that offer incentives for testing, the interrelations between marriage and sexual relations in developing countries, the role of social interaction processes for fertility and AIDS-related behaviors, and the determinants and consequences of low fertility in developed countries. Kohler combines extensive knowledge about the determinants of fertility-, AIDS-, and health-related behaviors in developing and developed countries, considerable experience in sophisticated econometric analyses, including analyses with controls for endowment and unobserved determinants of individuals’ behaviors, extensive experience in the design and implementation of large-scale data collection in Malawi. Kohler has been awarded the Clifford C. Clogg Award for Early Career Achievement by the Population Association of America for his interdisciplinary work on fertility and health. He has also been a recent fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Science, served as the president of the Society of Biodemography and Social Biology, and was engaged as lead-paper author in the Copenhagen Consensus Project to evaluate policies to prevent the sexual transmission of HIV and reduce population growth. He is also the PI of the NIH grant “Consequences of High Morbidity and Mortality in a Low-Income Country” (R01HD053781) that supports the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH).
Xiaoying Liu  |  xiaoyliu@sas.upenn.edu
Xiaoying Liu (Ph.D. in Economics, University College London, 2012) is a postdoc researcher at the Population Studies Center and Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interest is in empirical micro economics, development economics, early childhood development, environmental economics and environment and health, consumption and saving, and Chinese economy.
Esteban Enrique Puentes Encina  |  epuentes@fen.uchile.cl
Esteban Puentes (Ph.D. in Economics, University of Chicago, 2007). He is a Researcher in the Centro de Microdatos and Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Universidad de Chile. He is an investigator on the University of Pennsylvania component of the GCC project consortium. His research has focused on labour markets, program evaluation and inequality. His work has been published in Cepal Review, Applied Economics, LABOUR and the Journal of International Development. He has been a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, The World Bank, The United Nations Development Program and the Budget Office in Chile. Esteban obtained B.A. and M.A degrees from Universidad de Chile.
Whitney Schott  |  whitney.b.schott@drexel.edu
Fan Wang  |  fanw@sas.upenn.edu

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Consultants

Harold Alderman  |  h.alderman@cgiar.org
Harold Alderman, with both a master’s degree in nutrition (Cornell) and a Ph.D. in economics (Harvard), has naturally gravitated to research on the economics of nutrition and food policy. He spent 10 years at the IFPRI prior to joining the World Bank in 1991. He rejoined IFPRI in 2012. While at the World Bank, he divided his time between the Development Research Group and the Africa region where he advised on social protection policy. His current research has focused on the linkages between nutrition and early child development and the means by which nutrition and social protection programs contribute to long term economic growth.
Afua Appiah-Yeboah  |  sappiahyeboah@gmail.com
Afua Appiah-Yeboah (PhD in Demography and MPH in Health Behaviors and Education) is a research and evaluation scientist who is skilled in quantitative and qualitative analysis. Her research largely focuses on children’s human capital in developing countries. As a consultant to the GCC project, she is conducting research that determines the health-wealth gradient in children’s nutritional outcomes in rural Malawi. Other research includes an investigation of the role of maternal social capital on children’s educational outcomes, and an investigation of the association between smallholder farm subsidies and changes in household wealth. Dr. Appiah-Yeboah has conducted program evaluations and survey projects for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other organizations. As a CDC-Michigan Population Fellow, she carried out a population-based demographic and reproductive health survey for Zimbabwean ministry of health. As a Population Council consultant, she collaborated with the Navrongo Health Research Center in Ghana to develop social and livelihood interventions for a USAID-funded project to reduce female circumcision in northern Ghana. Her research work is motivated by a passion for building evidence based health policies and programs in developing countries, especially within Africa.
Nazlı Baydar  |  nbaydar@ku.edu.tr
Julia Behrman  |  julia.behrman@gmail.com
Julia Behrman is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at New York University. She served as a Research Analyst on the “strengthening women’s assets for better development outcomes research program” at the International Food Policy Research Institute from 2009 to 2012. She holds an MSc from the London School of Economics.
David Bravo  david.bravo@uc.cl
Pia Rebello Britto  |  pbritto@unicef.org
Pia Rebello Britto, Ph.D., Senior Advisor, Early Childhood Development, UNICEF, is known internationally for her work in the area of translation of early childhood evidence for policy and programs. She has worked in over 40 low and middle income countries fordeveloping integrated systems and policies for early childhood. In particular, she has investigated the role of governance and finance of national systems in achieving equity, access and quality. Dr. Britto has also been involved in several early intervention program evaluations in Africa and Asia. Other aspects of her international work include the conceptualization of a measurement model for quality early childhood services, and measuring and implementing the school readiness paradigm and understanding the best modalities to support parenting. Most recently, Dr. Britto is involved in research that is examining the relationship between early childhood and peace building. Dr. Britto obtained her doctoral degree in developmental psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University and prior to joining UNICEF she was an Assistant Professor at Yale University. She is the recipient of several national and international grants and awards in recognition for her work and has published numerous books, articles, chapters and reports.
Benjamin T. Crookston  |  benjamin_crookston@byu.edu
Benjamin Crookston, PhD, MPH is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Science at Brigham Young University. He is a consultant for the GCC project consortium focusing on post-infancy growth, early childhood development, and cognition. Over the past nine years he has conducted research addressing maternal and child health challenges in a number of low-income settings. He is currently a co-investigator on the Young Lives Determinants and Consequences of Child Growth Project, which has received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and Grand Challenges Canada to further investigate child growth in Peru, Ethiopia, India and Vietnam. Other examples of recent research include the consequences of paternal absence on childhood nutrition in Peru, drinking water quality in Ghana, microfinance and health among adolescent girls in India, hygiene promotion in South Africa, asymptomatic malaria and stunting in Ghana, and folic acid supplementation in Peru. He has worked with a variety of research and non-governmental organizations in Cambodia, Ghana, India, Mexico, Nepal, Peru, Senegal, South Africa and the United States carrying out research and promoting child health. Dr. Crookston also teaches courses on international health and research methods.
Kirk Dearden  |  kdearden@bu.edu
For the past 17 years, Dr. Dearden has provided technical assistance to not-for-profit institutions to help them evaluate and improve upon the delivery of health services. For the first 12 years of his career, Dr. Dearden worked as senior research and evaluation specialist at the Academy for Educational Development, Johns Hopkins University, Save the Children, and the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh. More recently, he spent 5 years as a faculty member at Brigham Young University. Dr. Dearden continues to consult on applied research with the Academy for Educational Development, Save the Children/US, Freedom from Hunger, USAID and the World Health Organization among others. He has worked short- and long-term on development projects in Africa (Benin, Ethiopia, Kenya and Mali), Asia (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Georgia, India, Jordan, Moldova, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam and West Bank/Gaza) and Latin America (Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico and Nicaragua). Dr. Dearden’s research interests include the use of epidemiology and qualitative methods, program strategies designed to improve health and well-being, maternal and neo-natal health, malaria, acute respiratory infections, malnutrition in children less than 5 years of age and adolescent health.
Lia C. H. Fernald  |  fernald@berkeley.edu
Lia Fernald, Ph.D., MBA is Associate Professor in Community Health and Human Development at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a consultant for the GCC project consortium focusing on measures of child development. Dr. Fernald’s work has focused primarily on how inequalities in socio-economic position contribute to growth and developmental outcomes in mothers, infants and children, and on how interventions can address socio-economic and health disparities. Much of her work for the past decade has centered on looking at the effects of interventions (e.g. conditional cash transfer programs, parenting programs, microcredit interventions, and community-based nutrition interventions) on child development and maternal mental health, particularly focused on low- and middle-income countries. Dr. Fernald has published over 70 academic articles and book chapters in journals such as the Lancet, Pediatrics, International Journal of Epidemiology, Journal of Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, and Developmental Science. For the past several years, she has acted as an NIH Study Section reviewer for the Social Science and Population Studies Panel, as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and was selected as a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Experience-Based Brain and Biological Development Program. She is also Associate Editor for Public Health Nutrition.
Andrew S. Griffen  |  griffen@e.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Pınar Mine Güneş  |  pgunesh@umd.edu
Pınar Mine Güneş (B.A. in Economics, Bogazici University; M.S. in AREC, University of Arizona) is a Ph.D. candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a research affiliate at the Maryland Population Research Center, a consultant on the U Penn component of the GCC consortium, and a consultant for the Africa Region Gender Practice at the World Bank. Her research is in the area of development economics with an emphasis on program evaluation, education, health, and labor and demographic economics. She has experience in evaluating various public policies in a number of countries, including Georgia, Turkey, and the United States, and several African countries. Her current research examines the impact of female education, and mechanisms through which female education has its effects, on fertility and infant health, as well as the effects of teenage childbearing on maternal health. Recently, she is involved in the evaluation of the Adolescent Girls Initiative (AGI) program in Africa. She has presented her work at economics, development economics, and population conferences.
John Hoddinott  |  J.Hoddinott@cgiar.org
John Hoddinott (D.Phil. in Economics, Oxford, 1989) is Deputy Director, Poverty Health and Nutrition Division, International Food Policy Research Institute based in Washington DC. Before joining IFPRI he held university appointments in Canada and the United Kingdom, including a University Lectureship in Economics and Fellowship at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. He is a consultant on the University of Pennsylvania component of the GCC project consortium. His principal research interest lies in the microeconometric analysis of issues in development economics, particularly the causes and consequences of poverty, food insecurity and undernutrition, and the design and evaluation of interventions that would reduce these. He has published over 100 professional articles, book chapters and books (in leading general and field economic journals as well as demographic, nutritional and biomedical journals), has been a research consultant with all major international development donors, and has undertaken professional research or lecturing in over 30 countries. Research honors including receipt of prizes for outstanding research from the American Association of Agricultural Economists and the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research Centres.
Sue Horton  |  sehorton@uwaterloo.ca
Sue Horton (PhD Harvard, BA Cambridge, both in economics) is CIGI Chair in Global Health Economics at the University of Waterloo, and is a consultant on the U Penn component of the GCC consortium. She works on economics of nutrition, public health, labour markets, household time allocation, women’s work, poverty, and policy evaluation, primarily in low and middle income countries. She has published more than 100 journal articles, book chapters and technical reports, and 5 books. She has served as a consultant to at least a dozen international organizations, and has conducted professional research or lectured in almost 40 countries, three quarters of these in low and middle income countries.
Çiğdem Kağitçıbaşı ckagit@ku.edu.tr
Çiğdem Kağitçıbaşı (B.A. Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA; Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, USA) is a professor of psychology and former Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey Professor Kagitcibasi has served on the Executive Committees of the International Social Science Council and the International Union of Psychological Science since, also as Vice President. She is a Past President of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology and the Turkish Psychological Association. She is one of the first ten elected founding members of the Turkish Academy of Sciences. She was a visiting scholar at the University of California (Berkeley), Columbia, Duke and Harvard Universities and was twice a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.
John Maluccio  |  jmalucci@middlebury.edu
John A. Maluccio (Ph.D. in Economics, Yale University, 1997) is associate professor of Economics at Middlebury College and a consultant on the Penn grant). His research interests lie in the microeconometric analysis of issues in development economics, particularly the determinants of health and education, program evaluation, and the long-term consequences of early childhood malnutrition and poverty. He has experience in the collection and analysis of longitudinal data from a number of countries including Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, and South Africa, much of this gained prior to coming to Middlebury, when he was a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
Sergio Urzúa Soza  |  surzua@fen.uchile.cl
Jan van Ravens  |  van.ravens@yale.edu
Jan van Ravens’ present area of work is the development of strategies and scenarios to expand and improve early childhood services in low and middle income countries*. The emphasis is on policy development, planning and finance. Scientific evidence is being used for political breakthroughs. Partners include international organizations such as UNICEF, World Bank, UNESCO and Aga Khan Foundation, as well as ministries and civil society organizations in the countries. His mission is (i) to draw lessons from these country projects; (ii) to develop tools and methodologies; and eventually (iii) to arrive at more general recommendations for consensus building and policy development in early childhood development. His former positions include (i) Senior Policy Analyst in a UNESCO-based team that issues the annual Education for All Global Monitoring Reports, (ii) Head of Multilateral Affairs in the Netherlands Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and (iii) Policy Coordinator for Higher Education and Lifelong Learning in the Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs. Having participated in OECD- and EU-networks, Jan sees international comparison as an important means to understand and improve the functioning of education, health and other public service systems.

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