CUBIC’s Academic Community
Lauren Bader is a Research Fellow at IAST. Her research examines the cultural and neurobiological underpinnings of parenting and social-emotional development. Most of her work has focused on understanding cultural beliefs about infant development as well as how the social and physical environment are linked to parents’ responses to their infants among the Gamo of Southern Ethiopia. More recently, she has investigated the role of maternal sensitivity and infant attachment in biobehavioral attunement between infants and their mothers.
Lauren received a Ph.D. in Child and Family Studies from the University of Tennessee and was a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Training Fellow in Developmental Science at the University of Michigan prior to coming to IAST.
Amanda Berlan is an Associate Professor in Responsible Business at the University of Leicester. She is a Social Anthropologist by training, and her broad interest is in the field of sustainable agriculture, with a particular focus on cocoa and the chocolate industry. Her research focuses on business ethics, sustainability, cocoa production and chocolate, child labor, fairtrade and food certification, supply chains, and global food systems. She has extensive experience in fieldwork with cocoa communities in Ghana, India and the Dominican Republic, and has worked extensively with corporations, NGOs, governments and the United Nations.
Amanda received a D.Phil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford and a B.A. in Modern Languages.
Wändi Bruine de Bruin is Provost Professor of Public Policy, Psychology, and Behavioral Science at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, and director of the USC Behavioral Science and Well-Being Policy initiative. Her research aims to understand and inform how people make decisions about their personal health, their carbon footprint, and their household finances, with more than 150 peer-reviewed publications on these topics. She has been studying risk perceptions and protective behaviors, food insecurity, age differences in mental health, and political polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis.
Wändi received her Ph.D. in Behavioral Decision Research and Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University, her M.Sc. in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon University and her M.Sc. in Cognitive Psychology from Free University Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
Leys Dinarte-Diaz is an Economist in the Human Development Team at the World Bank's Development Research Group. Her research interests are in education, with a focus on violence and crime. In her projects, she examines how educational interventions can modify at-risk youth outcomes, including academic performance, socio-emotional skills, and violent behavior. Additionally, some of her projects analyze the interaction between crime and welfare, noting how illegal organizations usually harm countries’ economic growth path. Lelys has research projects in some fragility and conflict affected settings and other Latin American countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Jamaica, Colombia, Peru, South Sudan, Mozambique, and Ukraine.
Lelys is affiliate at CESifo Research Network and at the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN). She obtained her Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and her B.A. in Economics from ESEN in El Salvador, the country where she was born and raised.
Anne-Laure Fayard is Chaired Professor in Social Innovation at NOVA School of Business and Economics in Lisbon Portugal. She is the founder and coordinator of the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab and the Academic Advisor of the Master’s in Impact Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She is also a Visiting Research Professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
Anne-Laure is an ethnographer of work, whose interests involve collaboration, technology, innovation and design. In the last 10+ years, she has developed a research stream on social innovation, with a focus on cross-sector collaboration, open social innovation and co-creation and design. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), an M. Phil. in Cognitive Science from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), an M. Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from La Sorbonne (Paris) and an MA in Philosophy.
Stephanie Majerowicz Nieto is an Assistant Professor at the University of Los Andes and a Research Affiliate at briq. Her research focuses on understanding how to improve public service provision in Latin America, with a primary focus on improving the quality of public education. She currently works with governments in Latin America to evaluate the impact of education policies on learning outcomes. Other research interests include economic growth, industrial policy, and political economy.
Stephanie received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Stanford University. She has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank Group’s Poverty Global Practice and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.
Taylor Newton is Associate Professor of Psychology at Lenoir-Rhyne University. Her areas of research include social influences, the interrelationship of religious identities and beliefs, moral behavior, and perceptions of the relationship between science and religion. In 2020, she received an Appalachian College Association Faculty Fellowship Award to support her sabbatical working with researchers and government officials to identify ways to apply insights from behavioral science to further public health goals during the COVID-19 pandemic and other research.
Taylor holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Denver.
David Smerdon is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Queensland (UQ) School of Economics. His areas of research include behavioral and development economics, with a focus on social norms, the impact of refugee integration, the relationship between inequality and trust, and attempts to stop female genital mutilation.
David received his PhD in Economics from the Tinbergen Institute and the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He is also a chess Grandmaster, which has allowed him to cultivate his skills in problem solving, such as strategic intuition, memory, and an understanding of psychological behavior.
Ivo Vlaev is a Professor of Behavioral Science, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick. Ivo received a DPhil (PhD) in Experimental Psychology from the University of Oxford (and St. John's College). Before coming to Warwick, Ivo worked as a research fellow at University College London and senior lecturer at Imperial College London. He has a track record of research in decision science (behavioral economics) and behavior change, which is published in peer-reviewed academic journals, book chapters and government reports. In behavior change, Ivo’s research focuses on developing an integrated theory of behavior change which combines principles from psychology, neuroscience, and economics.
Ivo is also a co-author of the famous UK Cabinet Office MINDSPACE report, which provides a framework for designing effective policy utilizing the latest insights from behavioral sciences (also known as nudge theory). Ivo has helped public and private organizations develop and apply lessons from behavioral science.
Román Andrés Zárate is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto. His research lies at the intersection of the economics of education, development, and organizational economics. He is affiliated with the Blueprint labs at MIT, the briq Institute in Germany, and is an invited researcher at J-PAL. Román has ample experience in conducting and evaluating randomized control trials in education and working with governments in Latin America. He has collaborated with the Peru Ministry of Education to implement and evaluate an education policy program in boarding schools in Peru. He has also worked with administrative data from the governments of Peru, Colombia, and Chicago Public Schools.
Román received his Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his M.A. and B.A. in Economics from Universidad de los Andes.
Augustin Tapsoba's areas of expertise include development economics, the economics of the family, and conflict studies. His research aims to understand the socio-economic challenges that households face in developing countries. His recent work focuses on how social norms influence household decision-making and equilibrium outcomes on the marriage markets of sub-Saharan Africa. Some of his previous work also looked at how (and why) the mere anticipation of adverse socio-economic conditions (e.g., civil wars and pest invasions) can have long-term detrimental effects on children.
Augustin earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). He holds a Master’s degree in economics from the Erasmus Mundus QEM consortium (Université Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, University of Bielefeld, and UAB) and a degree in Statistics from ENSAE-Senegal
Renos Vakis leads the Mind, Behavior, and Development Unit (eMBeD) at the World Bank, championing the integration of behavioral science into policy-making across governments and institutions. His research at the intersection of behavioral science and development spans a diverse range of issues, from poverty dynamics and mobility to aspirations, mental well-being and health, social protection, climate change, social cohesion and norms. Renos is also actively involved in leveraging technology and innovation to scale evidence-based behavioral solutions in addressing development challenges and knowledge diffusion. He also contributes to the wider adoption of behavioral science through advisory roles with various institutions, alongside his university teaching commitments.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
James was Co-founder and CEO of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics from 2014-2020, based in Nairobi. James oversaw Busara's expansion from 8 employees and $100k in revenue to 135 employees with over $12 million in annual sales, and led their expansion into 20 markets including Nigeria and India.
Following Busara, James served as COO to BankOnit, a venture-backed digital bank aiming to disrupt financial services on the continent.
Before Busara, he was a Research Manager and Project Associate with Innovations for Poverty Action running large scale randomized trials in Kenya. James holds a BA from University of Arizona, where he majored in Economics and Mathematics. He pursued his MBA at Stanford for a year before dropping out to focus on his role at BankOnit and subsequent ventures.
Faisal Naru is Director and Co-founder of Think Test Do. He works with and advises public and private sector leaders and their institutions on strategy, organisational design and management, regulatory and public policy, evaluation and international development, in particular applying behavioural insights. Faisal has over 20 years of global experience; most recently he was the inaugural Executive Director of Nigeria’s Policy Innovation Centre (Africa’s first national-level Behavioural Unit), prior to that he founded the work on behavioural insights at the OECD advising governments across the world and applying behavioural insights in corporate management, and he is a former member of the United Kingdom Government’s Cabinet Office. He is a keynote speaker at a number of international and national level conferences and at a number of leading university programmes and courses.
Faisal holds a B.A. and M.A in Mathematics from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.
Dr. Saugato Datta is Co-Founder & Principal at Venn Advisors, a behavioral science collective. He specializes in the nuanced application of behavioral insights to program and policy design in low- and middle-income countries in Asia and Africa, as well as the evaluation of these and other interventions using randomized control trials and other experimental and quasi-experimental methods. He previously set up and led the international development portfolio at ideas42, a leading applied behavioral science firm, where he supervised over 50 projects applying behavioral insights to global health, social protection, sustainability, governance, labor market programs, and education, including over 20 randomized control trials. His research has been published in leading academic and policy journals, including the Journal of Development Economics, the World Bank Economic Review, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in economics from Cambridge and Delhi University.