Towards 2021/2022 HDR

Michèle Lamont is Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies and the Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies at Harvard University. She served as the 108th President of the American Sociological Association in 2016-2017 and she chaired the Council for European Studies from 2006-2009. She is also the recipient of a 1996 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2014 Gutenberg research award, and the 2017 Erasmus prize (for her contributions to the social sciences in Europe and the rest of the world). She is also the recipient of honorary doctorates from five countries (Canada, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK). A cultural and comparative sociologist, Lamont is the author or coauthor of a dozen books and edited volumes and over one hundred articles and chapters on a range of topics including culture and inequality, racism and stigma, academia and knowledge, social change and successful societies, and qualitative methods. Her most recent publications include the coauthored book Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel (Princeton University Press 2016); the 2017 ASA Presidential Address “Addressing Recognition Gaps: Destigmatization and the Reduction of Inequality” (American Sociological Review 2018); and a special issue of Daedalus on “Inequality as a Multidimensional Process” (coedited with Paul Pierson; summer 2019). Lamont is a former Director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow for 2019-2021, she spent 2019-2020 on sabbatical at the Russell Sage Foundation. She is working on a book on social change and repertoires of hope, to be published by Simon and Schuster (US) and Penguin (UK).

Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam is the President of Singapore, following several years of serving as Senior Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and as Minister of Finance. He is also Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and advises the Prime Minister on economic policies. He is concurrently the Chairman of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore’s central bank and financial regulator. Tharman co-chairs the Global Commission on the Economics of Water. He also chairs the board of trustees of the Group of Thirty, an independent council of economic and financial leaders from the public and private sectors and academia. He recently served on the High-Level Advisory Board established by the UN Secretary-General that made recommendations for the 2024 Summit of the Future. Tharman had earlier co-chaired the G20 High Level Independent Panel on financing the global commons for future pandemic security in 2021. He also led the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance, which in Oct 2018 proposed reforms for a more effective system of global finance for growth, sustainability and financial stability. He was also Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) from 2011-2014, the first Asian to hold the chair. Tharman has co-chaired the Advisory Board to the Human Development Report since 2019, as well as the Global Education Forum. He is also on the External Advisory Group to the IMF Managing Director, and the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees. Tharman has spent his working life in public service. In addition to his responsibilities in the Government, he is currently Deputy Chairman of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and chairs its Investment Strategies Committee.

Prof. Olu Ajakaiye is a Fellow and past President of Nigerian Economic Society. He is currently Chairman, African Centre for Shared Development Capacity Building (ACSDCB), Ibadan Earlier positions he had held include: Director, Economic Development Department, NISER, Director-General, Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Ibadan (1999- 2004) and Director of Research, African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) Nairobi; Kenya, 2004-2011). Prof. Ajakaiye was President, Nigerian Economic Society (2013-2015), Member, National Conference, 2014; Member, National Economic Management Team, 2013-2015, Vice President for Africa, Intergovernmental Council of Management of Social Transformations (MOST) of UNESCO (2000–2004); editor, Journal of Economic Management (1995–2002); Business Manager, African Journal of Economic Policy (1994–2004) and Editor, AERC Supplement of the Journal of African Economies (JAE) (2004-2011). Chairman, National Core Team for the preparation of the Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (I-PRSP) (2002) and Chairman, Economic Policy Working Group of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda, Federal Ministry of Agriculture (2014). He served on National Working Committee for the Preparation of Nigeria’s Vision 2010 and 2020 as well as the Economic Recovery of Growth Plan, 2017-2020, Advisory Panel of the UN African Human Development Report, 2011, Advisory Committee of the Centre for Globalization and Development, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Technical Advisory Group of the Natural Resource Charter, University of Oxford, Advisory Board, 2016 Human Development Report, New York; Advisory Board, 2019 Human Development Report, UN, New York, among others. Prof. Ajakaiye consults for several international organizations including The World Bank, UNECA, UNDP, ECOWAS, IDRC, ACBF, JICA (UK), EU, DFID, British Council, BMGF, and numerous Nigerian government Ministries, Departments and Agencies.

Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University, and a three- year term as President of the International Economic Association. He was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016, and prior to that Professor Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India, 2009 to 2012. Earlier, he had been Director of the Center for Analytic Economics, 2006-09, and Chairman of the Department of Economics at Cornell, 2008-9. During his early career in Delhi, he founded the Centre for Development Economics, and served as the first Executive Director of the Center. Basu has published extensively in the areas of development economics, welfare economics, industrial organization, and game theory. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Republic of Beliefs: A New Approach to Law and Economics, Princeton University Press, 2018. In 2008 Kaushik Basu was conferred one of India’s highest civilian awards, the Padma Bhushan, by the President of India.

Professor Dame Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Prof Coyle co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity and has advised the government on economic policy. Professor Coyle is also a Director of the Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission. She has served in several public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, of the Migration Advisory Committee and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a DBE for her contribution to economic policy in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours. Her research interests include economic statistics and the digital economy, competition policy and digital markets, the economics of new technologies, natural capital, and infrastructure. She is the author of numerous books including Cogs and Monsters, Markets, State and People: Economics for Public Policy, and GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, all published by Princeton University Press, and she has published extensively in journals such as Nature, Economica, Regional Studies, Journal of Economic Methodology, and Review of Income and Wealth.

Oeindrila Dube is the Philip K. Pearson Professor at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on the political economy of development. I study topics like the link between poverty and conflict, and the role of trust and institutions in the spread of epidemics. In recent work, she has examined how community involvement affected responses to the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone. In other current projects, Oeindrila uses big data to understand radicalization in the Middle East, and experimentally examine strategies for improving community-police relations in the United States. Her research affiliations include the NBER, CEPR, BREAD, and J-PAL, where she serves on the Board as co-chair the Crime and Violence Sector. She is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Center for Global Development, and a co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics. She completed her PhD at Harvard University, her MPhil in Economics at Oxford University and her undergraduate degree at Stanford University. She was also the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship in 2002.

Cai Fang is s an academician of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and serves as the chief expert of the National Think Tank at CASS. He also holds a position as a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People's Bank of China. Professor Cai has previously served as the Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Director of the China-Africa Institute at CASS. He was also a member of the standing committee of the 11th, 12th, and 13th National People’s Congress (NPC) of China, and the Vice Chairman of the Rural Affairs Committee of the 13th NPC. His research focuses on various aspects of China's economy, including economic reform and development, population and labor economics, economic growth, income distribution, and poverty reduction. He has published extensively on these topics. Among his recent publications are "The Era of Population Decline" (CITIC Press, 2023), "China's Economic Development: Implications for the World" (Taylor & Francis, 2023), and "China’s Economic Growth Prospects - From Demographic Dividend to Reform Dividend" (Edward Elgar, 2016).

Marc Fleurbaey is a Professor at the Paris School of Economics, Associate Professor at Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, and Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris since July 2020. Prior to that, he was the Robert E Kuenne Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies, and Professor of Public Affairs and the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, an economist at INSEE (Paris),and a professor of economics at the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Pau (France). He has also been a Lachmann Fellow and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, a research associate at the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics and the Institute for Public Economics (IDEP, Marseilles), and a visiting researcher at Oxford. He is a former editor of the journals Economics and Philosophy and Social Choice and Welfare. He is a co-editor of Rethinking Society for the 21st Century, Report of the International Panel on Social Progress (2018), and the Oxford Handbook of Well-being and Public policy (2016), the author of Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare (2008), a co-author of A Manifesto for Social Progress. Ideas for a Better Society (with O. Bouin, M.L Salles-Djelic, R. Kanbur, H Nowotny, and E. Reis, 2018) Beyond GDP (with Didier Blanchet, 2013), A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare (with François Maniquet, 2011), and the coeditor of several books, including Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls (with Maurice Salles and John Weymark, 2008). His research on normative and public economics and theories of distributive justice has focused on the analysis of equality of opportunity and responsibility-sensitive egalitarianism and on seeking solutions to famous impossibilities of social choice theory. Marc Fleurbaey has a PhD in Economics from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Until his appointment as Minister of Economy, Planning and Cooperation in Senegal in April 2019, Mr. Amadou Hott was the Vice President of the African Development Bank's Power, Energy, Green Growth and Climate Change Complex, since November 2016, and has 20 years of experience in areas such as structured finance, sovereign wealth funds management, investment banking, infrastructure and the development of integrated energy solutions. Prior to joining the African Development Bank, Amadou held various Investment banking and Investment advisory positions in New York, London, Dubai and Lagos. He was Director of Millennium Finance Corporation for Africa, where he was responsible for project finance operations in sectors such as energy, mining, ICT and banking in Africa and Middle East. He was also Managing Director of UBA Capital, which is present in 20 African countries, and then founder and managing Director of Afribridge Capital, an investment firm specializing in advisory services in Africa where he provided advice in the areas of energy, electricity, information, communications and technology. In 2012, after 15 years of international investment banking and advisory work, Amadou returned to Senegal to serve his country. His roles in Senegal included: Special Advisor of HE President Macky Sall, Chairman of Aeroport Internationale Blaise Diagne (Senegal's new international airport) and Founder and CEO of Senegal's Sovereign Wealth Fund, as part of which he launched major infrastructure investment initiatives, including renewable energy and energy projects. Amadou has undergraduate degrees in applied mathematics and economy, an MSc in Finance, from Sorbonne University in Paris, which included participation as an exchange student in New York University's MSc in Financial Mathematics program. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2012.

Ravi Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Prof. Kanbur has served on the senior staff of the World Bank, including as Resident Representative in Ghana, Chief Economist of the African Region, and Principal Adviser to the Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has also served as Director of the World Bank's World Development Report. Prof. Kanbur is President of the Human Development and Capabilities Association, Past-President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, Chair of the Board of UNU-WIDER, Co-Chair of the Scientific Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, past-member of the High Level Advisory Council of the Climate Justice Dialogue, member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance, and past-member of the Core Group of the Commission on Global Poverty. His recent books include a book on inequalities in Asia (co-authored with Changyong Rhee and Juzhong Zhuang from Asia development Bank).

Harini Nagendra is an ecologist and Professor of Sustainability. Over the past 30 years, she has been at the leading edge of research examining conservation in forests and cities of South Asia from the perspective of both landscape ecology and social justice. For her interdisciplinary research and practice, she has received a number of awards including the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award. Her publications include the books "Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future", "Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities" and "Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India's Cities (with Seema Mundoli) as well as recent papers in Nature, Nature Sustainability, and Science. Harini Nagendra writes a monthly column 'The Green Goblin' in the Deccan Herald newspaper and is a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of urban sustainability in India. She is also the author of The Bangalore Detectives Club, a historical mystery fiction series set in 1920s colonial Bangalore. Professor Nagendra has been a Lead Author on the IPCC AR5 reports, and a past Science Committee member of DIVERSITAS and the Global Land Programme. She engages with international science and policy through her involvement as a Steering Committee member of the Future Earth Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society, and an Advisory Board Member of the Future Earth Urban Knowledge Advisory Network.

Thomas Piketty is a French economist and currently works as a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and at the Paris School of Economics (PSE). He is the Co-Director of the World Inequality Lab. Earlier he has worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He has a M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the ENS, and a Ph.D. in economics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the London School of Economics. Prof Piketty is the initiator of the recent literature on the long-run evolution of top income shares in national income. These works have led to radically question the optimistic relationship between development and inequality posited by Kuznets, and to emphasize the role of political, social and fiscal institutions in the historical evolution of income and wealth distribution. He is also the author of the international best-seller Capital in the 21st Century. He is a columnist for the French newspaper Le Monde.

Prof Belinda Reyers’ work bridges sustainability science and development practice. Together with regional and international collaborators from research, policy and practice, she focuses on co-producing and mobilizing research and knowledge to help build the understanding and capacity of early career researchers and practitioners to navigate the complex social-ecological development challenges facing Africa. These experiences also directly shape and inform the research programs she leads. A current focus of her collaborative transdisciplinary research is to understand the dynamic linkages between sustainability and equity, especially in the context of more complex, connected and uncertain futures. Prof Reyers received her PhD from the University of Pretoria, South Africa in 2001. She subsequently established and led the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Research Group at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where she worked as a Chief Scientist until 2015. From 2015 – 2018, Prof Reyers was the Director of the GRAID Resilience and Development program at the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden. She returned to South Africa in 2018 to take up a Research Chair in Sustainability Science at Future Africa at the University of Pretoria.

Dan Smith is the Director of SIPRI. He has a long record of research and publication on a wide range of conflict and peace issues. Among other issues, he has studied and written on the relationship between climate change and insecurity, peace and security issues in the Middle East, peacebuilding, the ethics of forcible intervention in conflicts, gender and conflict, nuclear arms control and strategy, and global conflict drivers, dynamics and trends. Smith served four years in the UN Peacebuilding Fund Advisory group, two of which (2010–2011) were as Chair. He has an intimate knowledge of how peacebuilding works (or doesn’t) in a wide variety of countries and regions. He was part-time Professor of Peace and Conflict at the University of Manchester, attached to the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute from January 2014 to mid-2017 and remained an Honorary Professor till 2021. He is the author of successive editions of atlases of politics, war and peace, and the Middle East and blogs on international politics at www.dansmithsblog.com. He has lived most of his adult life in the UK with a 10-year spell in Norway. He has travelled professionally to more than 60 countries.

Professor Sun earned her PhD in Economics from Peking University. She served as Dean of the Peking University School of Economics from 2010 to 2018. She has also served as an academic moderator at the International Insurance Society's (IIS) annual meeting for more than ten years and is the first female recipient of the IIS John Bickley Founder’s Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to insurance research and education. Professor Sun has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard University and NBER. Her major areas of research include development strategies of the Chinese insurance industry; comparative studies of the international insurance market; and financial integration.

Ilona Szabó de Carvalho is a civic entrepreneur and a globally recognized thought leader. She is the co-founder and president of the Igarapé Institute – a global think-and-do tank committed to human, digital and climate security. Ilona serves on several boards, including the UNSG High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, the Brazilian Center of International Relations (CEBRI) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso Foundation (FFHC). She is also the co-chair of the Global Future Council on the Future of Nature and Security and a former Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum. She was nominated in 2020 as one of the world's top 50 thinkers for the Covid-19 age by Prospect Magazine. She earned a Master’s Degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Uppsala in Sweden, is an affiliate scholar at the Princeton University Brazil Lab, and was a public policy fellow at Columbia University in NY. Ilona is a columnist at Folha de São Paulo, a podcaster and TV commentator, a TED speaker and an author of 3 books. Previously, Ilona was the Executive-Secretary of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, coordinated a national gun control campaign in Brazil, and worked for 5 years in investment banks in Rio de Janeiro.

Prof Watene’s research addresses fundamental questions in ethics, politics, and Indigenous philosophy. In particular, it engages at the intersections of diverse philosophical traditions, transdisciplinarity, and the role of local communities for global change. Her primary areas of expertise include mainstream theories of well-being, development, and justice, Much of her work is written from the perspective of the 'capability approach' - improving people's lives by expanding their real opportunities to live the kinds of lives they value and have reason to value - and centers Māori and other Indigenous Philosophies. Prof. Watene's work is applied and engaged - encompassing a range of justice and ethical issues, in such areas as health policy, environmental sustainability, and a variety of development considerations, as they feature within communities. Prof Watene holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews. She was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2018 for research on intergenerational justice. She serves on the research committee of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga – New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence https://www.maramatanga.co.nz/, has served on the Strategic Leadership Group of Te Punaha Matatini https://www.tepunahamatatini.ac.nz/, and is a member of the Independent Resource Group for Global Health Justice https://www.irg-ghj.org/ Prof Watene has been a member of the HDR Advisory Board since 2020.

Helga Weisz is full professor of Industrial Ecology and Climate Change at Humboldt-University Berlin and head of the FutureLab Social Metabolism and Impacts at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany. Previous positions include assistant and associate professor at the Institute of Social Ecology, Vienna, guest professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, University St. Gallen, and Yale University. Her academic background is in Molecular Biology, Cultural Studies and Social Ecology. Her research focuses on the socially organized extraction of raw materials and energy, its transformation into goods and services, its use and final disposal to the environment as waste, emissions and heat, which, collectively, define the social metabolism. Transforming the industrial metabolism to reduce its environmental and resource impacts, while maintaining its function for human well-being, is a crucial challenge for sustainability. Prof. Weisz investigates socio-metabolic transitions and patterns at global, national, local, and sectoral scales and their implications for wellbeing, inequality, and power relations. She has published in high ranking general and specialized journals such as PNAS, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, Environmental Research Letters, Earth System Dynamics, Journal of Industrial Ecology, or Ecological Economics among others. Among many other science community services, Prof. Weisz is a member of the governing board of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Laxenburg, Austria, of the steering committee of the Swiss National Science Foundation's National Research Program "Sustainable Economy" (NRP 73), of UNEP’s International Resource Panel and editor–in-chief of the transdisciplinary sustainability journal GAIA.