KING CENTER - Key Persons
Dr. Artiles was elected Vice President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to lead its Social Context of Education Division. He has received mentoring and research awards from AERA, The Spencer Foundation, and Arizona State University. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of AERA and the National Education Policy Center. He was a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Artiles received an honorary doctorate from the University of Göteborgs and is an honorary professor at the University of Birmingham.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Earth
Alison Hoyt is an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford. Her work focuses on understanding how biogeochemical cycles respond to human impacts, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable and least understood carbon stocks in the tropics and the Arctic. For more information, please visit her group website here.
Allison N. Grossman was a postdoctoral fellow at the Immigration Policy Lab. Her research investigates how cooperation between international actors and governments of "fragile" states can mitigate suffering and improve welfare in West Africa and the Sahel. Allison received her PhD in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the domestic political consequences of international intervention. She also holds a BA in political science and human rights studies from Barnard College.
Job Titles:
- Core Staff Member
- Communications and Engagement Manager
Anwyn is a Communications and Engagement Manager at the King Center on Global Development. She oversees the center's outreach strategies to policymakers, academics, journalists and other leaders in global development, sharing Stanford's research-based solutions to the root causes of global poverty and inequity.
Prior to joining the King Center in 2023, Anwyn worked across nonprofit, for-profit, philanthropic and higher education sectors, leading communications and cause-marketing initiatives, addressing topics from equity and environment, to marine and wildfire science. Anwyn's experience in global development stems from almost a decade with Oxfam, where she led communications and media relations on global development initiatives around the world.
Anwyn holds a bachelor's degree from Boston University with creative training from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC.
She was born and raised in Kenya, East Africa, to parents working in wildlife conservation. For the last decade, Anwyn has managed a California family ranch with her husband and two children, focusing on regenerative land stewardship and holistic farming.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Associate Professor of Economics
Arun Chandrasekhar is an associate professor in the economics department at Stanford. He works on development economics and studies the role that social networks play in developing countries. He is particularly interested in how the economics of networks can help us understand information aggregation failures and the breakdown of cooperation in the developing world. His research approach is methodologically diverse, and includes novel data collection, field experiments, and observational data analysis.
Professor Chandrasekhar holds a BA from Columbia University and a PhD in economics from MIT.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor
Ashley Styczynski, MD, MPH, is an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases & Geographic Medicine and Global Health Faculty Fellow, and a Medical Officer in the International Infection and Control Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Dr. Styczynski's research interests are in infectious disease epidemiology, global health, emerging infections, and antimicrobial resistance. She holds an MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and an MD from University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to coming to Stanford for her infectious disease fellowship, she spent two years as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer at the CDC. During her time as an EIS officer, Dr. Styczynski conducted outbreak investigations on Zika virus, vaccinia virus, and rabies. She is currently conducting research on antimicrobial resistance and interventions to reduce nosocomial infections within low-resource healthcare facilities.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Augustin Bergeron is a postdoctoral fellow at the King Center. In Fall 2022, he will join the University of Southern California (USC) as an assistant professor in the department of economics. He works on topics spanning development economics, public economics, and political economy. His primary research agenda explores the determinants of state capacity and tax capacity in particular. His second agenda focuses on the origins of social ties (especially kinship) and their effects on development. His field work is based in the D.R. Congo, where he helps manage a non-profit survey organization called ODEKA. He received a PhD in Political Economy and Government at Harvard in 2021.
Job Titles:
- Research Staff Member
- Research Program Manager
Ben is the Research Program Manager for the Guestworker Migration Initiative. His main interests lie at the intersection of migration, development, and humanitarian work. Before joining the King Center, Ben worked on a portfolio of migration-focused projects at the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley and conflict and violence prevention research at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He received his BA in political economy from UC Berkeley and his MA in humanitarian studies from Uppsala University in Sweden.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Professor of Earth System Science
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).
Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).
Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Binta Zahra Diop is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. Her work aims to understand migration and location choices of people under constraints, both positive (driven by central policy choices) and normative (from fairness principles). Binta received her PhD in economics at the University of Oxford and she will be joining Boston College as an assistant professor in 2025.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Associate
- Core Staff Member
Blanca is an Administrative Associate at the King Center on Global Development.
Blanca has an Associate Degree in Marketing from ESIC University in Madrid, Spain, and an Accounting Certificate from Santa Clara University. In the past, she has worked for the Consulate of Spain in San Francisco and for technology companies in Silicon Valley.
Blanca was born and raised in Spain, and considers Spain and California home. She speaks Spanish as her first language, English fluently, and is working on her French.
Blanca used to practice kickboxing and biking, but not anymore. Now, she runs daily, and is learning to sail as her exciting new hobby. She also loves traveling, cooking, reading, classical music, and the TV show "Murder, She Wrote".
Job Titles:
- Core Staff Member
- Senior Event Planner
Béline Falzon is a Senior Event Planner at the King Center on Global Development. She manages the planning, logistics, and financials for events such as the Speaker Series.
Béline joined the King Center in 2022. Previous jobs include being an event planner for the Cornell University School of Veterinary Medicine and the California Teachers Association. She briefly worked in the fine food industry after graduating with a master's degree in marketing from SciencesPo Paris.
Béline speaks French as her mother tongue, English (mostly) fluently, and is working on her Spanish. In her free time, she enjoys crafting, playing board games, and reading sci-fi novels.
Dr. Lee is a postdoctoral fellow at the department of pediatrics-neonatology of the School of Medicine. Dr. Lee received her PhD in system dynamics (SD) from the University of Bergen, Norway. She is a system modeler using SD to build simulation models to study population-level health intervention and implementation, health services delivery, and health policy. The SD approach facilitates transdisciplinary research by drawing relevant yet segregated actors and sectors together, which are usually studied separately, to provide comprehensive pictures of the causal relationships within the health systems and the social system.
Job Titles:
- Affiliated Researcher
- Fellow at the Conflict
Chagai is a postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict and Polarization lab at the King Center. Chagai Weiss is a political science PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Middle East Initiative predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. Chagai's core interest is in examining how institutions and the people within them shape intergroup relations in divided societies. He is also working on several projects examining the effects of scalable interventions for prejudice reduction, the electoral effects of conflict, the institutional origins of partisan polarization, and experimental methods. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Cambridge University.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business
Chenzi Xu is an assistant professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research is at the intersection of finance, international economics, and economic history. She focuses on the relationship between banks and international capital and goods flows, with a particular interest in understanding how historical events impact and shape modern outcomes.
Chuck Eesley is an associate professor and W.M. Keck Foundation Faculty Scholar in the department of management science and engineering at Stanford University. As part of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, his research focuses on the role of the institutional and university environment in high-growth, technology entrepreneurship.
David Cohen is a leading expert in the fields of human rights, international law, and transitional justice, as well as one of the world's leading social and legal historians of ancient Greece. Before coming to Stanford, Cohen taught at UC Berkeley as the Ancker Distinguished Professor for the Humanities and served as the founding director of the Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center. Cohen holds the WSD-HANDA professorship in human rights and international justice and is appointed in the classics department at Stanford. He also serves as a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Cohen's research into war crimes tribunals began with a project to collect the records of the national war crimes programs after WWII. Since 2001, Cohen's work has focused on contemporary tribunals and transitional justice initiatives. Cohen has led justice sector reform initiatives and tribunal monitoring programs overseas and at the regional level. Cohen serves as the advisor to the executive director and the governing board of the Human Rights Resource Center and leads the Center's research projects. Cohen also directs the Summer Institute in International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.
Professor Cohen received his JD at UCLA's School of Law, his PhD in classics and ancient history from Cambridge University, and an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Zurich.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
Dottie King have a long-standing dedication to global development. Drawing inspiration from relationships built by hosting more than 50 of Stanford's international students in their home over the last 55 years, Bob and Dottie have made numerous significant philanthropic investments to empower students and entrepreneurs working in emerging economies. At Stanford, in addition to their support for the King Center, the Kings are founding donors of Stanford Seed, an initiative led by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Stanford Seed partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets and provides them with training, coaching, and networking support to build thriving enterprises that transform lives. The Kings also have provided generous support for Knight-Hennessy Scholars, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford Athletics, and several other areas across the university.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University
- Research Director for Stanford Emergency Medicine International
Dr. Jennifer A. Newberry is a clinical assistant professor at Stanford University. Dr. Newberry's interest in social justice and population health led to her current work in global health and emergency medicine. Her current research seeks to understand how to strengthen crisis support systems in developing countries for women experiencing gender-based violence or other medical emergencies.
Dr. Newberry is currently the research director for Stanford Emergency Medicine International (SEMI). In collaboration with SEMI and the largest ambulance service in the world, she runs the Online Medical Research program, collecting data across nine states on the epidemiology of emergency medical complaints in the prehospital setting.
Newberry earned her law degree and medical degree from the University of Chicago. After graduating from residency at Stanford, she completed a fellowship in Social Emergency Medicine and Population Health.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Eleanor Wiseman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center on Global Development. Prior to joining Stanford, she earned her PhD in Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California Berkeley in 2023. She is also involved with the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford.
Her research interests are in development economics, political economy and trade. Her primary research agenda focuses on informal agriculture trade and the role of corruption, bargaining, gender and information. Most of her projects are located in East Africa.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Core Staff Member
- Finance Associate
Elise is a Finance Associate at the King Center on Global Development and has also been working with Stanford Nano Shared Facilities since 2022. She has an economics B.S. from George Mason University, and many years of small business management experience.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor in Biology
Erin Mordecai is an associate professor in Biology, a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, a faculty fellow in the Center for Innovation in Global Health, and a member of Bio-X. She studies the ecology of infectious diseases in plants, animals, and humans. Using mathematical modeling and empirical methods, her research examines how climate, species interactions, and global change drive disease dynamics.
Dr. Mordecai holds a BS from the University of Georgia and a PhD from UC Santa Barbara. After completing her PhD, she earned a mathematical biology postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill and NC State University.
Job Titles:
- Vida Jacks Professor of Education
Francisco O. Ramirez is the Vida Jacks Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. His current research interests focus on the worldwide rationalization of university structures and processes and on terms of inclusion issues as regards gender and education. Recent publications may be found in the Oxford Handbook on Globalization and Education. Sociology of Education, Comparative Education Review, Social Forces, and International Sociology. He has been a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Studies of the Behavioral Sciences (2006-07), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (2017), and the Free University of Berlin, Cluster of Excellence Contestations of the Liberal Script (2022).
Gary L. Darmstadt, MD, MS, is associate dean for maternal and child health and a professor in the department of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Previously, Dr. Darmstadt was senior fellow in the Global Development Program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), where he led a cross-foundation initiative assessing how addressing gender inequalities and empowering women and girls leads to improved health and development outcomes. Prior to this role, he served as BMGF director of family health, leading strategy development across nutrition, family planning, and maternal, newborn, and child health.
Darmstadt was formerly associate professor and founding director of the International Center for Advancing Neonatal Health in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He has trained in pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, in dermatology at Stanford University, and in pediatric infectious disease as a fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he was assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and the School of Medicine. Dr. Darmstadt left the University of Washington to serve as senior research advisor for the Saving Newborn Lives program of Save the Children-US, where he led the development and implementation of the global research strategy for newborn health and survival. He holds a BS from California Polytechnic State University, an MS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an MD from the University of California, San Diego.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine
Grant Miller is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Miller's primary interests are health economics, development economics, and economic demography. His work has been published in numerous journals including the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, the Lancet Global Health, and the American Economic Journal. He holds a BA from Yale University and an MPP and PhD from Harvard University.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Professor, School of Medicine
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in Management
Irene Lo is an assistant professor in management science & engineering at Stanford University. She holds an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Columbia University.
Lo's research is on designing matching markets and assignment processes to improve market outcomes, with a focus on public sector applications and socially responsible operations research. Her research interests also include mechanism design for social good and graph theory.
Job Titles:
- Core Staff Member
- Administration and Finance Manager
Irina Lechtchinskaia is an Administration and Finance Manager at the King Center on Global Development.
Irina manages the King Center finances and budget, assists with HR and visitor appointments, provides management and coordination of administrative and operations-related functions for the center.
Irina joined the King Center in 2016. Previously, she worked at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an assistant director at the Centers and Initiatives for Research, Curriculum & Learning Experiences (CIRCLE).
She holds diplomas from Tomsk State University, Russia, and École des Mines de Paris.
Before Stanford, Irina worked at the New York Press Association, and INSEAD.
Irina speaks Russian and French. She is currently learning Japanese.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Department
Jade Benjamin-Chung, PhD MPH, is an assistant professor at Stanford University in the department of epidemiology and population health. Her research applies causal inference and machine learning techniques to study interventions to control, eliminate, or eradicate environmentally-transmitted infectious diseases, including interventions to prevent malaria, diarrhea, soil-transmitted helminths, and influenza. She is the recipient of a K01 Career Development Award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to estimate spillover effects of malaria eradication interventions in southern Africa (K01AI141616). She completed her graduate training in epidemiology and biostatistics at UC Berkeley and joined Stanford in May 2021.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Advisor to the Poop Group
- Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Jenna Davis is the faculty advisor to the Poop Group and director of Stanford's Program on Water, Health & Development. Her research and teaching focuses on the interface of engineered water supply and sanitation systems and their users in developing countries. With a background in public health, infrastructure planning, and environmental science & engineering, Davis explores questions related to interventions that trigger household investment in water, sanitation, and hygiene improvements; the features of water and sanitation services that users value and why; the health and economic impacts of improvements in water supply and sanitation; and the keys to long-term sustainability of installed infrastructure.
Over the past 15 years she has carried out applied research in more than a dozen developing countries, most recently in Zambia, Bangladesh and Uganda. Davis and her group (the "Poop Group") have extensive experience in designing and implementing primary data collection in resource-constrained environments across developing regions. She teaches undergraduate and graduate level courses in public health, water, and sanitation planning in developing countries, and the theory and practice of sustainability. She holds an MSPH and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jenna Forsyth (M.S.E., PhD) is a postdoctoral fellow with Stanford University's Woods Institute for the Environment, primarily contributing to the Stanford Lead Initiative funded by the King Center on Global Development. She completed her PhD with the Stanford Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources and obtained her Master's in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of Washington. Her research brings together principles of environmental science, epidemiology, and behavior change. Dr. Forsyth has spent nearly 15 years addressing global and environmental health problems, particularly contaminants in air, water, soil, and food, with a recent emphasis on lead exposure. She has field research and professional work experience in numerous countries, including Bangladesh, Kenya, Tanzania, Costa Rica, and Australia. Dr. Forsyth's recent research has focused on understanding and preventing lead exposure in South Asia from informal battery recycling and other sources like turmeric adulterated with lead chromate.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Postdoctoral Fellow
Jeremy Bowles was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the King Center. He studies the political economy of development, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and a substantive focus on questions of state capacity and electoral accountability. He received a PhD in political science from Harvard University in 2021 and, in September 2023, joined the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at University College London as an assistant professor.
Jeremy Weinstein is a professor of political science, the Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He also is faculty co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab and the Data for Development Initiative at the King Center. In addition, he is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on a number of non-profit boards and advisory groups. He obtained a BA with high honors from Swarthmore College, and an MA and PhD in political economy and government from Harvard University.
Weinstein's research focuses on civil wars, political violence, ethnic politics, the political economy of development, democracy, and migration. His books, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence and Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action, received the William Riker Prize and the Gregory Luebbert Award, respectively. He has also received the International Studies Association's Karl Deutsch Award and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. His articles have been published in numerous journals including the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Foreign Affairs, and the SAIS Review.
Weinstein has worked at the highest levels of government on major foreign policy and national security challenges, engaging in both global diplomacy and national policy-making. Between 2013 and 2015, Weinstein served as the deputy to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; before that, he was the chief of staff at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. During President Obama's first term, Weinstein served as director for development and democracy on the National Security Council staff at the White House. Before joining the White House staff, Weinstein served as an advisor to the Obama campaign and as a member of the National Security Policy Working Group and the Foreign Assistance Agency Review Team.
Jessica is a Student Event Assistant at the King Center on Global Development. As a Stanford undergraduate student, she is majoring in communication, focusing on digital media studies. So far, Jessica has been a New Student Orientation Coordinator during Stanford's first virtual year in 2020, an Administrative Assistant at Stanford CareerEd, and a Marketing Intern at Bloom Energy.
Jessica is from Raleigh, North Carolina but grew up in a Nigerian household with her 3 younger sisters. In her spare time, she loves baking and keeping up with fashion trends.
Job Titles:
- Interim Director and Executive Director
- Interim Director, Executive Director and Research Scholar
Jessica Leino is the Interim Director and Executive Director of the King Center on Global Development. She served as the King Center's deputy director from 2014 to 2019 and the center's interim director from 2019 to 2020. Prior to joining Stanford, Leino was a Senior Economist at the World Bank, where her work focused on expanding coverage and improving the quality of social protection programs in South Asia. She joined the Bank in 2008 through the Young Professionals Program.
Leino holds a BA in economics from Harvard, an MPhil in development studies from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. She has previously worked at the Brookings Institution and as a project evaluation consultant in East Africa. Her research has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and other academic and policy outlets.
Job Titles:
- Student Staff Member
- Student Project Assistant
Julia is a Student Project Assistant at the King Center on Global Development. She is a senior majoring in Psychology. She recently began a coterm MA in Sociology and is interested in the social networks of migration, particularly at the Mexico-US border.
She has lived in Sonora, Mexico, since she was six years old, just two hours away from the US. Although she has spent the last years studying in the United States, Sonora is where she considers home. Her interests were born there: She likes to dance, both socially and traditionally, and she loves to read, from horror and graphic novels to indigenous Latin American literature.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Professor of Political Economy
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Professor of Political Science
Job Titles:
- Core Staff Member
- Program Manager
Job Titles:
- Member of the Faculty Steering Committee
- Associate Professor of Economics
Job Titles:
- Research Staff Member
- Research Program Manager
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of Development
- Core Staff Member
Job Titles:
- Core Staff Member
- Marketing and Engagement Specialist