Archives: Team

Dr. Sanchita Banerjee Saxena is a researcher working at the intersection of social science, public policy, and human rights. She is currently the Executive Director of the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley and the Director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies under the Institute. She is also a lecturer of responsible business at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Dr. Saxena is the editor of Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia: Bangladesh after Rana Plaza (Routledge, 2020) and author of Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries (Cambria Press, 2014). She has been a Practitioner Resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. She is currently a non-resident Research Fellow at the Institute of Human Rights and Business and serves on the BRAC USA Advisory Council. She frequently gives invited lectures and publishes commentaries in the popular media. Dr. Saxena holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. For more information, please visit sanchitasaxena.com

Ann Quandt is the Chief Finance and Administration Officer at Upstream USA, overseeing accounting, finance, HR, legal, information systems, and facilities.

Most recently, Ann was the Chief Financial Officer at Partners In Health (PIH), a $150 million international healthcare nonprofit based in Boston. At PIH, Ann was responsible for the global finance, accounting, grants management, and IT functions of the organization, spanning 10 countries and 200 health facilities. During her 11 years at PIH, Ann worked to develop a professional finance and accounting function that allowed the organization to more than triple in size and support the work of more than 18,000 PIH staff. Ann also led the creation of a Central Analytics and Applications team, introducing data warehousing as well as a host of valuable tools, including PowerBI, to support the organization globally.

Ann is a graduate of Washington and Lee University and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Outside of work, Ann enjoys running, tennis, and keeping track of her three children.

Catherine Muther built a business career in the Internet infrastructure industry, as senior marketing officer at Bridge Communications, 3Com and Cisco Systems, Inc. Cate is a social enterprise field builder as founder, funder, board member, impact investor, and professor. She was a Founding Partner and Chair of the Board of Acumen. She is the founder of Astia, a business accelerator with global reach for women technology entrepreneurs; and Springboard Enterprises, a resource hub for women entrepreneurs seeking early stage capital. She was on the original Advisory Board of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Ms. Muther is a Director of Magnum Foundation and PolicyLink. She is on the Advisory Board of the Global Philanthropy Forum, and Emeritus Acumen Advisory Council. She has received numerous awards for business and philanthropic leadership. Ms. Muther was a guest faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College where she taught undergraduate Economics seminars on Global Poverty and Social Entrepreneurship. She also taught a graduate course in Frugal Innovation at ITP, Interactive Telecommunications Program, at New York University. Cate is a graduate of Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Cambridge University, and Sarah Lawrence College.

Christina is an independent consultant with expertise in impact investment, investment banking, and country risk.

She spent 15 years at J.P. Morgan until retiring from the firm as a Managing Director in 2012. In 2007, she designed and launched the firm’s Social Finance business as a unit of the investment bank providing financial services to the impact investments market. Christina also led various risk management teams at J.P. Morgan, including Sovereign Risk & Advisory and Credit Portfolio Risk Management.

Prior to J.P. Morgan, Christina worked at the World Bank as Country Officer, helping develop reform programs for the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia. In 1991, she served on the Economic Reform Committee for the Government of Kazakhstan.

Christina has also worked for Ashoka-Innovators for the Public and serves on the Board of BRAC USA and the Advisory Board for the Center for Financial Inclusion. Christina earned a M.Sc. degree in Economics from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Sociology from UCLA.

Cassie Landers has a Doctorate in Education, as well as a Master’s in Public Health, both from Harvard University. Since 1985, Dr. Landers has worked with UNICEF and other international agencies to promote policies and programs in support of young children and their families. She has provided technical assistance and support to child development programs in over 60 countries throughout Southern Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. A primary focus of her work has been the design and evaluation of integrated community-based programs to support parents and families. She has been a primary investigator of several multicounty school readiness initiatives for high-risk children. In collaboration with the Open Society Foundations, Dr. Landers has designed a MA in Early Childhood Development, BU-IED University, Bangladesh. She has been instrumental in the development of curriculum materials for BRAC’s Play Labs in collaboration with the Lego Foundation. Additional international activities include the development of child protection strategies for children in emergencies, and a program for mapping and assessing child protection systems. She is currently on the faculty in the Department of Population and Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and teaches courses in child development and global health.

Dean Karlan is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance, and co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University. He is the Founder and President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a research and policy nonprofit that discovers and promotes effective solutions to global poverty. His research focuses on development and behavioral economics, typically using experimental methods to examine questions about poverty and behavior change. In particular, he published in Science a six-country randomized controlled trial of a multi-faceted program to help ultra-poor households build sustainable and independent sources of income, a program built on BRAC’s program in Bangladesh. His policy and research on this program is ongoing in Ghana, Philippines, Uganda, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. He is on the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. From 2005-2017 he was a professor of economics at Yale University, and from 2002-2005 he was a professor of economics at Princeton University. He co-founded stickK.com and ImpactMatters, and co-authored four books: More Than Good Intentions, Economics, Failing in the Field, The Goldilocks Challenge, and Economics, a principles textbook. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.

Lynn P. Freedman is the director of the Averting Maternal Death and Disability (AMDD) Program and of the Law and Policy Project, both in the Mailman School’s Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health. Before joining the faculty at Columbia University in 1990, she worked as a practicing attorney in New York City. Professor Freedman has been a leading figure in the field of health and human rights, working extensively with women’s groups and human rights NGOs internationally. She has published widely on issues of health and human rights, with a particular focus on gender and women’s health. She is currently serving as a senior adviser to the UN Millennium Project Task Force on Child Health and Maternal Health and is the lead author of the Task Force’s Final Report “Who’s Got the Power: Transforming Health Systems for Women and Children.

Carson Christiano is the Executive Director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a hub for research on poverty and global development headquartered at the University of California, Berkeley. Carson provides leadership to the Center’s scientific development, partnership, and outreach efforts. Since 2011, she has worked with faculty, donors, and partners to organize research initiatives across a range of important topics, including technology, financial inclusion, and energy. Prior to joining CEGA, Carson worked with Innovations for Poverty Action where she coordinated a large-scale, randomized evaluation of water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions in Western Kenya. She holds a Masters in Public Policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Northwestern University.

Dr. Chen is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and International Coordinator of the global research-policy-action network Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO). An experienced development practitioner and scholar, her areas of specialization are employment, gender, and poverty with a focus on the working poor in the informal economy. Before joining Harvard in 1987, she had two decades of resident experience in Bangladesh working with BRAC and in India, where she served as field representative of Oxfam America for India and Bangladesh.

Marty received a PhD in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of numerous books including Bridging Perspectives: Labour, Informal Employment, and Poverty, The Progress of the World’s Women 2005: Women, Work and Poverty, Mainstreaming Informal Employment and Gender in Poverty Reduction, Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture, and Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India. Dr. Chen was awarded a high civilian award, the Padma Shri, by the Government of India in April 2011 and a Friends of Bangladesh Liberation War award by the Government of Bangladesh in December 2012.

Dr. Amin is a Senior Associate for the Poverty, Gender, and Youth Program at the Population Council, where she has worked since 1995. She is interested in a range of issues related to gender, work, poverty, and family in the developing world. She has a strong interest in intervention research and has evaluated programs on microfinance, adolescent empowerment, financial literacy, incentives to change behaviors, prevention of child marriage, and prevention of gender-based violence. While most of her work takes place in Bangladesh, she has also conducted comparative studies on and written about Egypt, India, and Vietnam. Prior to coming to the Population Council, Amin was a research fellow at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies in Dhaka. She received a Ph.D. in demography and sociology from Princeton University in 1988.