About Me
As a graduate of Clark University's International Development and Social Change (IDSC) program in 1990, I was delighted to return to Clark as a faculty member in Fall 2012. In addition to teaching, advising and mentoring students, I regularly serve as the Coordinator of undergraduate program in IDSC. I contribute to intellectual debates on gender equality, land access and land tenure, and resilience and post-disaster management (see Publications page). I continue to engage in development practice, holding a range of consultancies with the Cloudburst Consulting Group (for USAID) and the Global Land Alliance (for the Millennium Challenge Corporation). I have on-going research projects in Sri Lanka (see Media and Research Projects pages). I am particularly proud of the career choices and endeavors that our IDCE students pursue after graduation (see Former Students page).
I consider myself a scholar-practitioner. My full-time work as a field practitioner between 2003 and 2012 informs my teaching and current research agenda. After finishing my PhD at Cornell University in 2003, I returned to Sri Lanka and worked with a local, Kalpitiya-based NGO on income-generating and health programming for members of the internally-displaced Muslim community. After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, I worked for a number of UN agencies and INGOs in relief, recovery and reconstruction programming and founded the Applied Research Unit (ARU), an UNOPS business unit that conducted a range of field-based studies for clients such as UNDP, UNICEF and the Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (examples below).
In June 2023, I took on the role of Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Sustainability and Social Justice (formerly IDCE)
In the summer, I divide my time between Sri Lanka and north central Massachusetts on a lake resonant with the above picture.
I created the Applied Research Unit (ARU) as an enterprise unit within UNOPS to provide applied social science research support to sister UN agencies and other project partners. As ARU project manager, in addition to a core team of 10, we created a roster of part-time, on-call researchers and enumerators in several districts across Sri Lanka's North and East to respond to urgent client needs. As a team, we piloted UNICEF's DevInfo software and several of the ARU team traveled to other countries to train UN staff on how to use DevInfo for rapid data collection and reporting. As a team we worked with clients to create questionnaires and open-ended interview protocols to gather data for project design or evaluation.