Scientific Committee

Atallah is an associate professor of agricultural and consumer economics and an associate director of the Center for the Economics of Sustainability at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research program generates recommendations to growers, landowners, and resource managers to manage their crops and natural resources in a way that balances economic and ecological objectives and constraints. His research interests include natural resource economics, bioeconomics, ecosystem services, and sustainable agriculture and food systems.

Prior to joining the University of Illinois, Atallah was assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire, 2015-20, and before that, he was an assistant professor at Purdue University. He holds an engineering degree in agricultural sciences from The Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in Lebanon, an MS in plant science from the American University of Beirut, and an MS in agricultural and resource economics from the University of California, Davis, in addition to his Cornell University

Jacob Conway is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His primary research fields are corporate finance and industrial organization. He studies the causes and consequences of firms engaging with social, political, and environmental issues. He also has related research on regulation, polarization, and discrimination.

He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Additionally, he earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics, economics, and statistics from the University of Chicago. Prior to pursuing a PhD, Conway worked as a senior research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Laura Derkson is a researcher at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo. She is currently on leave from her position as Assistant Professor of Health Economics and Strategic Management at the University of Toronto.

Her research interests are: health, education, development, information and networks. She is a J-Pal invited researcher and a affiliated with the Development Learning Lab.

Paul Novosad is an Associate Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is founder of Development Data Lab and a creator of the SHRUG open data platform for socioeconomic research in India and beyond. His research examines why poor countries have remained poor for so long, and what policy interventions can help improve people's lives in developing countries. His team builds new open source economic data from information age sources like satellites, and private and government sector data exhaust. Paul received his PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University.

Brittany Street is an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri in the Department of Economics, the Associate Director of the Economic and Policy Analysis Research Center (EPARC), and an affiliated researcher with the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) at the University of Michigan.  Her research focuses on labor and public economics, particularly the economics of crime and the criminal justice system.

Augustin Tapsoba is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics in Francem and visiting Northwestern University and Rice University during the 2024-2025 academic year. He's also a theme leader (Information and Conflict) of the CEPR ReCIPE program and an invited researcher at J-Pal. 

His fields of research are development economics, family economics, labor economics, and conflict studies. He hold a Ph.D. in Economics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE).

Silvia Vannutelli is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University Department of Economics, a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and an Affiliate Fellow at the Stigler Center at Chicago Booth. She's an applied economist using original and administrative data and rigorous empirical methods to answer policy-relevant questions. Her research focuses on core topics in public economics and political economy, that pertain to the collection of revenues and the allocation of government resources, the design of social insurance policies, and the role of institutions and political economy considerations in policymaking.

Srini Vasudevan is an Assistant Instructional Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics. His research focuses on development economics and political economy, specifically, on mass media and social networks, and its intersection with technology adoption, politics, and health. He's motivated by the study of knowledge/information generation, its dissemination, and impacts on beliefs, economic choices, and wellbeing. His recent work has been published in the Journal of Development Economics and World Development.

Vasudevan teaches courses in microeconomics, econometrics, and development economics with a mission to empower his students to engage with the frontier of knowledge, by emphasizing the use of modern pedagogical practices. He earned a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an M.R.P. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology.