Scientific Committee

Elisabetta Aurino is an economist working on child and adolescent development in low-resource settings.  She is passionate and committed to research that can contribute to positive societal change through better food security, health, and education for all children.

She is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Barcelona School of Economics. She is a Jacobs Foundation Fellow (2022-2025), a European Research Council Starting grantee (2023-2028). She is a J-PAL invited researcher and a Research Associate at the Barcelona Institute of Economics.  She is also a board member at the Association of ERC Grantees.

Saloni Gupta is the Jonathan M. Nelson Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Education at Brown University. Her work lies at the intersection of education, innovation, and economic development. She examines how education systems cultivate higher-order skills for a changing labor market and how new technologies shape the scaling of educational innovations.

She is an invited researcher with J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative. Her research has been supported by the Weiss Fund for Development Economics, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University, J-PAL’s Learning for All Initiative (LAI), and the What Works Hub for Global Education.

She completed her Ph.D. in Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 2024 and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford King Center on Global Development in 2025.

Sulagna Mookerjee is an Associate Professor of Economics at Binghamton University. Her primary research field is development economics, with a focus on gender and social norms. She received her PhD from the University of Rochester.

Laëtitia Renée is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Université de Montréal. She is an applied microeconomist specializing in labor economics broadly defined. Her work focuses on two core research orientations: understanding the socioeconomic and informational barriers that shape educational attainment, and examining how public policies can enhance women’s economic empowerment. Across these areas, she uses modern applied econometric methods, large administrative datasets, randomized experiments, and quasi-experimental variation to study how policy can meaningfully reduce inequality.

She received her PhD in Economics from McGill University in 2022. She is a Research Affiliate at the Research Group on Human Capital (ESG UQAM) and at the Maison des affaires publiques et internationales (UdeM), as well as an Invited Researcher at J-PAL North America. Her research has been published in AEJ: Applied Economics, Health Economics, and the Review of Economics of the Household, and has been recognized with several awards, including CLEF’s Best Young Researcher Paper Prize and the Upjohn Institute Early Career 

Jess Rudder is an Assistant Professor in the Applied Economics Department at Oregon State University. Her main areas of research are agriculture, small firms, digital services, and input markets. She often collaborates with NGOs and uses a combination of administrative data and surveys from randomized evaluations to study economic behavior. She has a PhD from the University of California Davis, and a master’s in public administration from the University of Washington. Prior to starting at Oregon State, she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago.

Hammad Shaikh is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Stavanger Business School in Norway. He completed my PhD in Economics at the University of Toronto in 2022. His research focuses on policies that promote student success in higher education, how supportive leadership affects employee retention, and how local language learning supports immigrants’ social integration. He uses field experiments, correspondent studies, and quasi-experimental methods in his research. 

Josh is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (UIUC). He completed a BA and PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. Between the two degrees, he was as a research assistant at the Center for the Economics of Human Development.  He works on applied econometrics questions, with an interest in instrumental variable methods, partial identification, and discrimination.

Jean Baptiste Tondji is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, with a research portfolio that bridges theoretical innovation and empirical application. His research interests encompass political economy, economic theory, and organizational economics, with a strong emphasis on fairness, inclusion, and efficiency in organizational design to foster a better society. Jean Baptiste has developed novel theoretical tools, including the Bayesian Shapley value for input valuation under uncertainty and the reciprocity set for inclusive, reciprocal decision-making, which apply across diverse economic and social environments. His empirical research includes network-based analyses of policy impacts during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as studies on government regulation and its interaction with market structures in long-term care markets. Jean Baptiste’s recent works appear in the RAND Journal of Economics, the European Journal of Operational Research, Games and Economic Behavior, the Journal of Mathematical Economics, the Journal of Population Economics, the Journal of Public Economic Theory, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, and Economic Letters.

Anna Ziff is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University. Her research is in public economics, with a focus on urban and environmental issues. She studies how place shapes economic outcomes and the effects of place-based policies, with attention to the methodological issues involved in studying the importance of place.