December 10th, 2010

Eric is the Rwanda Country Director for One Acre Fund, and has been with One Acre since 2007. He studied at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and the University of Cheik Anti Diop in Dakar, Senegal. Eric began his work in development in Mbale, Uganda where he redesigned household biogas digesters for a Ugandan NGO. From 2004 - 2006, Eric served the Cameroonian village of Tourou as a Peace Corps Volunteer, where he and his counterpart started a local NGO that continues work today in well-construction and water sanitation. Eric founded the program in Rwanda.

December 3rd, 2010

Tatiana Wah directs the Haiti Policy Program at the Earth Institute, Columbia University and is the Development Policy Advisor to the Government of Haiti. Before joining the Earth Institute, she was a professor of urban policy and development at Milano Graduate School, the New School for Management and Urban Policy. She specializes in regional and local development planning and developing nations, with a focus on small developing nations development policy. She has worked in Haiti with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation as the Privatization Program Administrator for the Government of Haiti. She has consulted for Caspian Associates where she has worked on common national development vision planning for UAE and Caspian region states. She has published two books focusing on Haitian development issues: Haiti’s Development through Expatriate Reconnection: Conditions and Challenges and In Search of Consensus after 200 years: Haiti’s Social System Structure and Development Challenge. She currently lives in Haiti.

November 12th, 2010

Dr. Jessica Fanzo is a Senior Scientist for Nutrition at Bioversity International, one of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres in Rome Italy. Before coming to Bioversity, Jessica served as the Nutrition Coordinator for the Millennium Villages Project and the Nutrition Director for the Center for Global Health and Economic Development (CGHED) at The Earth Institute, Columbia University in New York City from 2007 to 2010. In 2009, she was also the Regional Nutrition Advisor for East and Southern Africa at the Millennium Development Goal Centre at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. From 2004 to 2007, Jessica was the Program Officer for Medical Research at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation focusing on HIV/AIDS programs in sub-Saharan Africa. Her PhD in Nutrition was completed in 2000 from the University of Arizona, and was a Stephen I Morse Immunology Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University until 2004.

April 23rd, 2010

Dr. Elisabeth King (PhD, University of Toronto 2008) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Earth Institute, associated with the Department of Political Science and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP). She works on issues at the intersection of development, conflict and peacebuilding in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent projects in Rwanda and Liberia focus on examining how presumed social goods – such as education and development – may also contribute to conflict. Elisabeth also teaches an undergraduate study-abroad course in Kenya on conflict and peacebuilding in Africa.

April 9th, 2010

Dr. Susan M. Blaustein is co-director of the Millennium Cities Initiative and a director of the non-profit Millennium Promise. Prior to her work with the Earth Institute, Columbia University, she was a senior consultant and analyst with the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank focused on conflict prevention, and with the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based NGO supporting the efforts of international criminal tribunals to prosecute gross human rights abusers in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, East Timor and Sierra Leone. Blaustein also reported on conflict, politics and economics from the Balkans and Southeast Asia for such publications as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Her doctorate is from Yale, she was a Junior Fellow at Harvard, she did graduate work at Brandeis University and the Conservatoire de Liege and she graduated from Pomona College. Blaustein is currently finishing a book about the Rwandan genocide.

February 12th, 2010

Tony Barclay teaches a course in SIPA’s MPA in Development Practice program that focuses on practical management skills for development professionals. For 30 years, Barclay served as a senior executive at DAI, an employee-owned international development consulting firm with 2,500 employees working in more than 50 countries. He joined DAI’s development consulting staff in 1977, moved into a senior management role in 1979, and served as CEO from 1999 until his retirement in January 2009.  With support from DAI, Barclay created an interactive knowledge-sharing tool for development practitioners that is now supported by the Earth Institute, housed on the Quora platform, and managed by a team of MDA-DP students. Barclay was honored as the Greater Washington DC Government Contractor Executive of the Year in 2008. He chairs the boards of the National Peace Corps Association and Social & Scientific Systems, Inc., an employee-owned public health research firm, and serves on several other company and nonprofit boards, including DAI’s.  He received a B.A. in History from Yale University in 1967, and an M.Phil. (1976) and Ph.D. (1977) in Applied Anthropology from Teachers College at Columbia University.

January 22nd, 2010

Rustom Masalawala is the Director of Business Development at Millennium Promise and a Research Associate at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He brings a combination of public/private sector experience to the challenges of advancing business development in the Millennium Villages Project. In his prior job Mr. Masalawala worked as the Health Portfolio Manager at Acumen Fund, a leading Social Venture Organization. He has also served as a consultant to a number of organizations working in the developing world.  Mr. Masalawala holds a Bachelors in Physics/Math from the University of Mumbai, a Masters in Computer Science from SUNY and a Diploma in Business Management from Xaviers University.