Rachel Glennerster is Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a center in the economics department at MIT devoted to fighting poverty by ensuring that poverty policy is based on scientific evidence. Her research includes randomized evaluations of health and education in India, girls’ empowerment in Bangladesh, and community driven development in Sierra Leone. She oversees J-PAL’s work to translate research findings into policy action and helped establish Deworm the World of which she is a board member. She sits on the UK government’s Department for International Development’s Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact.
Before joining J-PAL, Rachel Glennerster worked on debt relief and the reform of the international monetary system at the International Monetary Fund, and financial regulation at the Harvard Institute for International Development and the UK Treasury. In the mid 1990s she was part of the UK delegation to the IMF and World Bank. She has a PhD in economics from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is coauthor of “Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases.”
