JEFFREY D. SACHS

Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

GLENN DENNING

Glenn Denning is a professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs, and Director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. He helped establish The MDG Centre, East and Southern Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, served as its first Director (2004 to 2009) and provided leadership to the Centre's agenda in agriculture and rural development and its support to the African Green Revolution. He previously held senior management positions at the International Rice Research Institute and the World Agroforestry Centre, and has lived and worked in Asia and Africa for more than 30 years. Denning served on the UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force (2004 to 2006) and is currently a member of the Senior Steering Group of the UN High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis.

TONY BARCLAY

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.

ANDRE CORREA D'ALMEIDA

André Corrêa d’Almeida is the Program Manager for the Master of Public Administration in Development Practice and Adjunct Faculty at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. André is also an expert of the Earth Institute in the fields of capacity building and international education programs on sustainable development. His current countries of focus are Jordan, Mozambique and China. André is a Visiting Professor of Public Policy Analysis and Implementation at the University of Saint Joseph (Macao, China) and at Pratt Institute (New York, U.S.). He has experience at the management level in the U.S., Europe, South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. André has had research published in several areas of Social Economics and Institutional Development and has received research awards from the University of Colorado at Denver, George Washington University, and the Portuguese Government. André received his Ph.D. in Public Affairs from the University of Colorado Denver and a M.Sc. in Project Management from Inter-University Institute of Macau (China).

JOHN W. McARTHUR

John McArthur is the Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of Millennium Promise, the leading international non-profit organization solely committed to supporting the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Dr. McArthur is also a Research Associate at the Earth Institute, where he previously served as Policy Director, and he teaches at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. Previously, Dr. McArthur served as Deputy Director and Manager of the UN Millennium Project and as a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University.

GORDON McCORD

Gordon McCord is Associate Director of the Earth Institute’s Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development and an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego’s School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.   He recently graduated from Columbia’s PhD program in Sustainable Development at the School of International and Public Affairs.  Gordon’s interests include economic growth and poverty reduction, the role of geography in economic dynamics, and the interaction of epidemiology and poverty (particularly in the case of malaria).  Prior to his doctoral work, Gordon worked as Special Assistant to Jeffrey Sachs at the Earth Institute and at the UN Millennium Project. 

PATRICIA MECHAEL

Patricia Mechael is the Director of Strategic Application of Mobile Technology for Public Health and Development at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Earth Institute and Adjunct Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. She has been actively involved in the field of International Health for 15 years with field experience in over 30 countries primarily in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. She has a Masters in International Health from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene (1998) and a PhD in Public Health and Policy from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2006), where she specifically examined the role of mobile phones in relation to health in Egypt. For over 10 years, Dr. Mechael has published and spoken extensively on the strategic role of mobile telephony and relevant software applications within an ecosystem of eHealth, public health, and telecommunications actors in low and middle income countries as well as the increasing need to engage women and girls more effectively in designing and implementing the solutions aimed at improving their health and quality of life. 

SARA MINARD

Sara Minard is Associate Lecturer at SIPA, where she teaches courses on Methods for Development Practice and Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship for Development, as well as advises student project teams for the EPD International Workshop and for SIPA’s student social venture plan competitions. Sara is a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Senegal and previously worked as a socio-economist at the OECD (2003-2007). Sara graduated from SIPA (2002) and Sciences-Po, Paris (2003) with a dual-degree Masters in International Affairs and is currently finishing her doctorate in economics at Sciences Po on social entrepreneurship in the informal economy in Senegal. She was recently a doctoral research fellow at EURICSE in Trento, Italy (2008) and a visiting scholar at the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University (2009).

VIJAY MODI

Vijay Modi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, the Director of Infrastructure Programs at the Millennium Villages Project, and the Director of Modi Research Group.  After receiving his PhD from Cornell University in 1984, Professor Modi pursued Post-doctorate research at MIT 1984-1986. Modi has taught at Columbia since the mid-1980s. His expertise is in the fields of Energy sources and conversion, heat/mass transfer and fluid mechanics. His current areas of research interest are related to: energy infrastructure, CO2 sequestration, fuel cells, distributed sensing/control of flow and heat transfer. He has authored or co-authored numerous journal papers, and served as the principal or co-principal of a number of research grants from government and industry.

LUCIA RODRIGUEZ

Lucia Rodriguez serves as the Director of the Global MDP Secretariat. For the past 20 years Dr. Lucia Rodriguez has been involved in the field of education.  For six years, she worked at Teachers College, Columbia University and held various positions in the Department of Bilingual/Bicultural Education. She also has experience working with nonprofit organizations including the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA), where she worked for nine years and served as Vice President of Education. A native of Cuba, Dr. Rodriguez completed her undergraduate work at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and received her Doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

PRABHJOT SINGH

Prabhjot Singh is Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs and Director of System Design for the Millennium Villages Project.  He has worked in Africa, South Asia and the United States on health system design and development, with a particular focus on organizational management of distributed workforces such as Community Health Workers.  His work blends operational research, analytical tool/technology development, with policy analysis to support sustainable development planning.  He has a medical degree from Cornell, a PhD in neural and genetic systems (Rockefeller) and post-doctoral work in sustainable development (Columbia). Prabhjot grew up in Nairobi and lives in Manhattan.