IGERT International Development and Globalization Program
     
Students

Jesse Anttila-Hughes (Sustainable Development)
Email: jka2110@columbia.edu

Jesse Anttila-Hughes is a second year PhD student in the Sustainable Development program. His current interests include climate and weather, finance, and microeconomic approaches to sustainability questions. Jesse graduated from Harvard in 2002 with an AB in Physics, and then studied at Peking University in Beijing. Jesse enjoys cooking, swimming, learning foreign languages, and kendo.

Miriam Boyer (Sociology)
Email: mlb2131@columbia.edu

Miriam Boyer is a third-year doctoral student in Sociology. Her work has engaged with social movements’ own voices and projects regarding development and globalization, in particular those of rural movements in Latin America. Her dissertation research will address how movements and other political actors shape, contest and regulate access to biological resources, including the quickly growing investments in biotechnology in agriculture. Related interests include theoretical debates surrounding ‘globalization’, ‘global governance’ and the state.

Gabriella Carolini (Urban Planning)
Email: gyc4@columbia.edu



Ernesto Castaneda-Tinoco (Sociology)
Email: ec2183@columbia.edu

Ernesto Castaeda-Tinoco is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and a member of the multidisciplinary IGERT Program on International Development and Globalization. He is particularly interested in the intersections between inequality, migration, remittances and development in Latin America. His present work focuses on exploring migration from Mexico into the United States and the effects that migration and remittance-economies have on family structure and human development, including the role that children in transnational families have in the reproduction of migratory patterns. He received his B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. Ernesto worked on issues around nuclear disarmament with the Global Security Institute in San Francisco before moving to New York.

Shubha Chakravarty (Economics)
Email: sc2267@columbia.edu

Shubha Chakravarty is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Economics. Her research interests center on issues of nutrition, food, and agriculture. She has studied and worked in several developing countries, including Chile, Mexico, India, and most recently Ethiopia and Kenya. In 2005, she worked with the office of the Prime Minister of Ethiopia to research price instability in domestic grain markets. In 2006, she conducted a household survey in Western Kenya looking at food insecurity and agricultural issues among HIV/AIDS afflicted households. She is also interested in the economic determinants of overnutrition and obesity in developed and developing countries. She holds a B.S. in Computer Science and a M.S. in Operations Research from Stanford University. Before joining Columbia, she worked as a software engineer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where she implemented computational models of social and epidemiological systems.

Dan Choate (Economics)
Email: dac2114@columbia.edu

Dan joined the Economics PhD program in 2004 with a focus on macroeconomic development policies. His research aims to understand the impact of large scale infrastructure projects in a developing country context and the factors that contribute to their success or failure. Particular attention is paid to the effects of real geography and the public/private relationship in project management. His current work looks at ports, road systems, and hydro-power projects in South-East Asia. Dan has a BA from Northwestern and an MPhil from Cambridge University where his dissertation focused on analyzing optimal policy responses to climate change. He has served as a consultant on a household survey in Pakistan as well as for Oxfam.

David DeRemer (Economics)
Email: drd2108@columbia.edu

David De Remer is a second year Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics, where he is specializing in international trade and industrial organization. Prior to Columbia, he worked for three years as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he analyzed consumer adoption of payment technologies and real supply-chain explanations for the decline in business cycle volatility since the mid-80s. He earned a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and an M.A. in Statistics from Harvard University, where his research focused on dynamic problems of CEO compensation.

Ashley Fox (Sociomedical Sciences)
Email: amf2116@columbia.edu

Ashley Fox is a third year Ph.D.student in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Her research interests focus on HIV/AIDS prevention and women's sexual and reproductive health and rights in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006 she worked with the Reproductive Health Research Unit in Durban, South Africa on a project to promote female condom use at the University of Natal, Westville. Her current research interests concern the role of inequality in cross-national HIV trends. She holds an M.A. and B.A. in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and worked as a Research Associate at Yale University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS prior to joining Columbia.

Guy Grossman (Political Science)
Email: gsg2102@columbia.edu

Guy Grossman is a third year PhD student in the Political Science department and a member of the multidisciplinary IGERT Program on International Development and Globalization. His current research interests include social policy in developing countries, politics of authoritarian regimes and the intersection between the two. In his dissertation Guy is focusing on explaining variations in social welfare policies under authoritarian regimes, with special focus on the Middle East. Guy has a one year old daughter, a wife, and LLB in Law and MA in Philosophy of Ideas both from Tel-Aviv University.

William Walker Hanlon (Economics)
Email: wwh2104@columbia.edu

Walker Hanlon is a second year PhD student in the economics department. His current research interests include inequality, economic growth, and conflict. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Economics in 2004, worked as an economics consultant at Bates White from 2004 to 2006, and has interned at the World Bank's Thailand office. Walker is an avid traveler and outdoorsman.

Fang He (Economics)
Email: fanghe05@gmail.com

Fang He is a third year Ph.D. student in Economics. He is specializing in development and labor economics with a special emphasis on education. He has been collaborating on randomized evaluations of several education programs in India and is also looking into evaluating education programs in China. He received his B.A. in Economics and B.S. in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley in 2005. ( www.columbia.edu/~fh2146)

Patrice Howard (Political Science)
Email: pzh1@columbia.edu

Patrice Howard is a fourth-year student in Political Science. West African Political and Economic Development are her areas of interest. Currently, she is working on her disseration which will explore the impact of "traditional rulers" on political and economic development in the West African region. Her goal is to conduct an empirical investigation into the claim that unofficial (non-elected) authorities affect political and economic decision-making at the national level in the West African countries of Senegal and Nigeria. In the past, she has conducted research on the efficacy of micro-credit organization in Senegal and Gambia.

Solomon Hsiang (Sustainable Development)
Email: smh2137@columbia.edu

Solomon Hsiang is a Ph.D. student in Sustainable Development. His current research projects focus on the interface of climate physics and economic/institutional performance. His broader research interests include climate dynamics, political economy, sustainability theory, preference formation and education. He received a B.S. in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science and a B.S. in Urban and Regional Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He directs the Caribbean Museum Boat Project and was a member of the founding editorial board of the MIT International Review.

Marissa King (Sociology)
Email: mdk2101@columbia.edu



Elena Krumova (Sociology)
Email: ebk2103@columbia.edu

Elena Krumova is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at Columbia University. Her research interests include economic and organizational sociology, comparative political economy, and governance. Currently, she is focusing on projects as a new form of organizing collaborative work across networks of regional organizations. She would like to further expand this research into a comparative study of regional development projects in Eastern Europe.

Narayani Lasala- Blanco (Political Science)
Email: ml2362@columbia.edu

Narayani Lasala is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science. Narayanis research has focused on the political decisions of the United States and Mexican governments that affect the multiple aspects of the bilateral migratory phenomenon. At Columbia she has specialized in the interaction between the American political system primarily public opinion and institutionsand the Latino migrants political behavior. Prior to arriving at Columbia she focused on the political processes that led Mexico to adopt agricultural policies encouraged by the World Bank and IMF in the early 1990s and their consequences for corn producers. She obtained an International Relations B.A. degree at El Colegio de Mexico with the dissertation The Corn Negotiation. NAFTAs Agricultural Agreement. Narayani worked closely with the Mexican Migrant community in California as she headed the Press and Commerce Office and coordinated the Program for Mexican Communities Abroad at the General Consulate of Mexico in San Francisco.

Stephan Litschig (Economics)
Email: sl2189@columbia.edu

Stephan Litschig is a job-market candidate in the Department of Economics at Columbia University. His research interests are in the areas of public economics and political economy with special emphasis on developing countries. He has worked with officials from Brazils internal audit institution in Brasilia to assess the causal impact of state judiciary presence on local government performance. The results of this joint work suggest that judicial presence improves local executives compliance with regulations and best practices in public management, financial reporting and program/project execution in particular. His current research focuses on evaluating the effect of federal transfers on local education spending and schooling. His research design exploits discontinuities in the revenue sharing mechanism between the federal and local governments which allows for causal inference that is as credible as inference drawn from controlled experiments. Results suggest that money matters. Prior to starting his PhD at Columbia, Stephan obtained an MA degree in international economics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and worked for the IMF section of the Swiss ministry of finance.

Emily Lundberg (Communications)
Email: emilylundberg@yahoo.com



Alexander McQuoid (Economics)
Email: afm2106@columbia.edu

Alexander McQuoid is a third year PhD student in economics, specializing in international trade and industrial organization. He holds a B.S. in mathematics from Georgetown University, an MSc in Philosophy and Economics from LSE, and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School. His primary research focuses on the impact of trade liberalization on organizational structures and the resulting interaction with labor market institutions. He is also interested in the interplay between economic systems and cultural values, particularly through their effect on institutional development. In his spare time, he studies group identity formation in early Christian apocryphal literature.

Ben Meier (Sociomedical Sciences)
Email: bmm2102@columbia.edu

Benjamin Mason Meier (Sociomedical Sciences) has been an IGERT International Development and Globalization Fellow at Columbia University's Department of Sociomedical Sciences since 2005. He received his B.A. in Biochemistry from Cornell University (1998), his J.D. from Cornell Law School (2001), and his LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Cornell Law School and Universite de Paris I (2001). Prior to entering his current doctoral studies, Mr. Meier held positions at the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Ann Aldrich. His interdisciplinary research-- at the intersection of law, political science, and public health-- examines the insalubrious effects of neoliberal economic policy on individual health status and national health systems. He is currently writing his dissertation on the development and evolution of the human right to health, publishing various articles in the international law and public health literature, and teaching Health & Human Rights at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health.

Anne Montgomery (Sociomedical Sciences)
Email: amm2195@columbia.edu

Anne Montgomery is PhD student in Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health. Her research aims to understand both the relationship between youth high-risk sexual behavior and poverty and unemployment, and the effectiveness of interventions to increase youth resilience under conditions of extreme poverty and high rates of unemployment. Specifically, Anne is interested in studying the character of economic opportunities generated by the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and their effect on the behavior of high-risk youth. She has a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Human Rights, Economic Development, and Politics in Latin America and an M.S. from the Harvard School of Public Health in Society, Human Development, and Health

Ngonidzashe Munemo (IGERT Alum/Political Science)
Email: Ngonidzashe.Munemo@williams.edu

Ngoni Munemo specializes in comparative politics, with a focus on contemporary African politics. His current work examines the political economy of drought relief in Botswana, Kenya and Zimbabwe. In addition, his research interest in drought and famine relief is motivated by the following set of questions: What is the effect of drought on households, rural communities and sectors of the economy? In the event that drought results in a threat of famine, which governments are more likely to protect citizens from starvation? Among responsive governments, what determines the form taken by government famine relief programs? Are some forms of famine relief more effective than others?

Eric Mvukiyehe (Political Science)
Email: enm2105@columbia.edu

Eric Mvukiyehe is a doctoral fellow in Political Science at Columbia University. He specializes in International Relations/Security and Comparative Politics. His main research interests focus on civil war terminations and resolutions, third-party peace-making and peacekeeping, and post-conflict peace-building processes (particularly, on issues related to external interventions, state-building and democratization in post-war countries). Eric is co-investigator on a survey research project entitled "Wartime and Post-conflict Experiences in Burundi," through which he seeks to examine whether and how United Nations peacekeepers influence combatants' attitudes and behaviors in such a way that they are willing to lay down their weapons and participate in the peace process. He is also working on a large-N project examining the impact of the types of incumbents governments and rebel groups on civil war durations and resolutions broadly defined to encompass conflict durations, types of war termination, durations of negotiations (if any), and the stability or precariousness of implemented peace settlements. Eric has done field-research for these projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which is also his motherland) and Burundi. He holds a BA from the University of Washington and an MA from Columbia University.

Daniel Neilson (Economics)
Email: dhn2102@columbia.edu

Daniel H. Neilson is a Ph.D. student in economics, where his fields of specialization are development and microeconomic theory. His research interests include the internal structure of firms, institutions, and markets, viewed both with relevance to macroeconomic outcomes and development and as a problem of microeconomic theory. He received his B.A. in mathematics and music from Simon's Rock College in 2001.

Anisa Khadem Nwachuku (Sustainable Development)
Email: akc2114@columbia.edu

Anisa Khadem Nwachuku is a third year PhD student in Sustainable Development with a concentration in Public Health. Her Master's research examined the political dimensions of health equity in Mozambique, and she is currently compiling a health equity sourcebook and preliminary quantitative analysis on the incoming MICS data for UNICEF. In addition to comparative Lusophone development, marginalization, exclusion, and disparities in health, Anisa's broader interests include social cohesion/capital and highly-divided societies, tropical IDs and diseases of poverty, equity-based development models, moral leadership and development as a transformative process, the commercial sex industry, and assessing the true economic impact of maternal mortality. She has worked for the United States Department of State, The Carter Center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. She holds a BA from Northwestern University in International Development Policy.

Laura Paler (Political Science)
Email: lbp2106@columbia.edu

Laura Paler is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science, specializing in comparative politics and the political economy of developing countries. Laura's research builds on the 'resource curse' literature by investigating the relationship between fiscal structure and incentives for good governance in developing countries reliant on taxation (rather than natural resources). She is also a researcher on a World Bank project evaluating the impact of community driven development on post-conflict reintegration in Aceh, Indonesia, where she recently spent three months conducting field research and designing a household survey. Laura's research interests also include the political and economic development of China, and she has published in China Quarterly on the emergence of public legislative hearings there. Prior to arriving at Columbia, Laura worked for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, designing and implementing democracy assistance programs in China, Hong Kong and Cambodia. She holds an MPhil in Comparative Government from Oxford University, St. Antony's College and a B.A. from The George Washington University.

Lily Parshall (Sustainable Development)
Email: llp15@columbia.edu

Lily Parshall is a fourth year PhD student in Sustainable Development at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She has worked on a range of local and global projects that investigate links between environmental resources and development. These include studying the relationship between New York City’s climate and energy demand; investigating agricultural development and water resources in Abu Dhabi; and modeling rural electrification scenarios and costs in Senegal and Kenya as part of a World Bank project. At Columbia, she has worked with the Center for Climate Systems Research and the Energy Group at the Columbia Earth Institute. Her current research explores institutional barriers to improving urban energy systems using a combination of energy modeling and policy analysis. She holds a BA in Earth and Environmental Science from Columbia University. Prior to entering graduate school, she taught environmental science and outdoor education at the American Community School in Beirut, Lebanon.

Cuz Potter (Urban Planning)
Email: jwp70@columbia.edu

Cuz Potter (MSUP, MIA, Columbia University, 2003) is pursuing his doctorate in urban planning at Columbia. Before returning to school, he worked as an editor and translator for the South Korean Ministries of Environment and Labor in Seoul. In New York, he has consulted for a variety of entities, including the Manhattan Borough President's Office, Herrick, Feinstein, LLP, and CIVITAS. He also has co-written a chapter entitled "The Heights: An Ivory Tower and Its Community" (in University as Developer, M.E. Sharpe, 2004) with Peter Marcuse and "A Tale of Three Northern Manhattan Communities" with Richard Bass for the Fordham Urban Law Journal (January 2004). For the World Bank he has published a study of slums entitles, "Inside Informality: Poverty, Jobs, Housing and Services in Nairobi's Slums" (Report No. 36347-KE with Sumila Gulyani and Debabrata Talukdar). In the summer of 2007, Socio-Economic Review published "Regional economies, open networks and the spatial fragmentation of production" (co-authored with Josh Whitford). Broadly interested the role of industrial districts within the global trade network, his current dissertation research focuses on the role of infrastructure in structuring the commodity chains that constitute the world system of cities.

John Powers (Urban Planning)
Email: jcp2002@columbia.edu

John Powers is a doctoral student in Urban Planning and has research interests in regional planning and economic development. His dissertation is focused on comparative regional economic development, specifically examining the process of innovation and technological learning in locations undergoing rapid industrialization. He has pursued industry sub-sector analysis to explore the micro-analytic features of technological change within the information and communications technology (ICT) sector in the metropolitan regions of Beijing and Dublin, two places of the world increasingly regarded as quite successful in these terms. How certain of these microeconomic features relate to larger macro-institutional policy designs, including the role of regimes governing access to urban land, is an important aspect of an inquiry into how some similar economic outcomes across both sectors and regions are linked to differentiated processes. Prior to beginning doctoral studies, John gained a master's degree in city planning from MIT. He also spent three years working in the Africa Region of the World Bank and a further three years in the International Division of Booz Allen and Hamilton.

Cyrus Samii (Political Science)
Email: cds81@columbia.edu

Cyrus Samii is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science, specializing in comparative politics and methodology. Cyrus's research focuses on the causes and consequences of civil wars, examining dynamics of participation in armed groups and post-conflict recovery at the micro level. He was co-investigator on the 2006-7 project "Wartime and Postconflict Experiences in Burundi," the centerpiece of which was a nationwide survey of over 3,000 civilians and former civil war combatants in Burundi. Before coming to Columbia he was a program officer at the International Peace Academy, where he worked on policy-research projects on the conflicts in Kashmir, Israel/Palestine, and Iraq. He has a BA from Tufts and an MIA from Columbia-SIPA.

Johannes Schmieder (Economics)
Email: jfs2106@columbia.edu



Prasanna (Guru) Sethupathy (Economics)
Email: ps2179@columbia.edu

Guru Sethupathy is a 3rd year PhD student in Economics at Columbia University. His research interests include development, trade, and industrial organization. He is currently working on a paper trying to determine whether exporting leads to firm-level productivity spillovers in vertical and/or horizontal industries. Through IGERT-IDG, he spent this past summer at the World Bank on a project identifying complementary policies to trade liberalization. Guru has a B.S. from Stanford and also worked for two years as an investment banker in the M&A group for JP Morgan in San Francisco.

Matthias Thiemann (Sociology)
Email: thiem327@newschool.edu

Matthias Thiemann, 27, German, studied Social Sciences in Berlin and Economics at The New School for Social Research. He is a Phd Student in the Sociology program and wants to study network indicators for Microfinance success. He is looking at how microfinance schemes might generate incentives for an entrepreneurial behavior that fosters a sustainable intercourse between an eco-system and rural settlements.

Matt Wai-Poi (Economics)
Email: mgw2101@columbia.edu

Matthew joined the Economics Ph.D. program in 2003 and has a specific research interest in development and inequality, particularly the relationship between development policies, inequality, and development outcomes. His current research seeks to evaluate the long-term impact of infant immunisation in developing countries on socio-economic outcomes such as various health indicators, educational attainment and enrolment, income and wealth, and their distributions. Previous research has looked at issues in measuring income, wealth and living standards, the effect of South-South trade competition on developing country manufacturing, and the impact of increased trade on household income and its distribution, and he has a regional interest in Southeast Asia. Matthew has degrees in Law and Commerce from Auckland University and a Masters of Economic Development from the Australian National University. He worked for four years as a management consultant with LEK Consulting and has been a Short-term Consultant at the World Bank in the Development Research Group.

Matt Winters (Political Science)
Email: msw22@columbia.edu

Matt Winters is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science, studying international political economy and anticipating the defense of his dissertation in the spring of 2008. His dissertation, "The Impact of Domestic Political Constraints on World Bank Lending Programs," examines how differing capacities for collective action among impoverished groups affect the implementation of international development projects. The dissertation analyzes targeting performance in two World Bank programs in Indonesia and also includes analysis of an original cross-country dataset constructed from World Bank project evaluations. In 2007, Winters published an article “An Obsolescing Bargain in Chad: Explaining Shifts in Leverage between the Government and the World Bank” (with John Gould) in Business and Politics and an article “Market Access or Efficient Production: Why Did South Korean Outward Direct Investment Persist After the Crisis?” in Asian Business and Management. In 2005, Winters was a summer intern at the World Bank, where he worked on a project related to clientelism and the formation of political parties. He also published a chapter in 2004 on “Inter-Korean Economic Relations” (with Samuel S. Kim).
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