Mario Miranda is Professor of Agricultural, Environmental & Development Economics at The Ohio State University and Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. His research has focused on the modeling of stochastic dynamical systems in economics with application to international economic development, agricultural finance and insurance, agricultural and environmental policy, food security, international trade, commodity pricing and industrial organization. His research has produced one book, which has been adopted for courses offered by seven of the top ten ranked doctoral programs in Economics in the world and over 80 peer-reviewed articles, two of which are among the three most frequently cited articles on “agricultural insurance”. He has advised thirty doctoral students to completion, including two winners and two honorable mention recipients of the Applied and Agricultural Economics Association Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Professor Miranda served seven years as Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental & Development Economics at The Ohio State University. He has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Computational Economics. He has also served as a consultant to the World Bank, U.S. Agency for International Development, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Food Policy Research Institute, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Chicago Board of Trade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the International Water Management Institute, and numerous private corporations. He has made over 170 presentations to professional and academic audiences and has worked on major research projects or taught courses in Bolivia, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ghana, Honduras, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, Peru, South Africa and Tanzania.

I am an Agricultural Economist and Research Associate (equivalent to a non-tenure-track assistant professor) at Cornell University, where I collaborate in the Equitable Agricultural Research Lab (led by Prof. Hale Ann Tufan). I am also a visiting scholar in the Food Systems Economics and Policy group at ETH Zurich (led by Prof. Eva Marie Meemken).

My research challenges assumptions about participatory research and farmers' engagement, revealing role and impact of farmers' knowledge in the process of adopting a new technology, technique or process.

My contributions span the academic fields of inclusive and gender-intentional method design, causal inference, intra-household research and food security studies. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, I analyze primary data from surveys, experiments, and interviews with farmers engaged in participatory research, at the household and intra-household level, alongside secondary data. In love with field work, I have conducted several primary data collections in Malawi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Burkina Faso and Italy.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia. My research focuses on the structural transformation of African economies, particularly how agricultural growth affects well-being and how labor shifts out of agriculture as economies develop. I hold a PhD in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University. Prior to my academic career, I worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, managing agricultural policy and data grants, and as an economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. I also hold BS and MS degrees in Earth Systems from Stanford University.

Md Shahadath Hossain is an Instructional Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. His research uses rigorous empirical methods to inform policies that reduce inequality of opportunity in healthcare access and human capital development.

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. I am an affiliate of the CESIfo Research Network, Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the Energy for Growth Hub. I am also an invited researcher at J-PAL under multiple funding initiatives.

Willa Friedman is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. She completed a PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley and a Bachelors in Social Studies at Harvard. She was previously a Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development. Before her PhD, she worked with International Child Support/Innovations for Poverty Action in Busia, Kenya. She uses field and natural experiments to understand how people make decisions about their own, their family's, and others' well-being, and how these decisions shape the ultimate impact of policies considered. This has included designing, managing, and analyzing the effects of large RCTs and natural experiments in Ghana, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Rwanda.

Krzysztof (Chris) Karbownik is an applied economist who is an associate professor at Emory University. His research is concentrated in three areas: infant and childhood health, family economics, and economics of education. On the first, he studied short-, medium- and long-run consequences of prenatal health, prenatal care incentives, access to hospital and nursing care in early childhood, sickness in childhood, and availability of junk food in childhood and adolescence. In family economics, his papers documented how parental decisions and resources shape the human capital development of their children and how siblings affect each other. Finally, in economics of education, he was involved in evaluation of school choice programs in Florida and Ohio. The overarching theme for all these research questions is understanding and enriching the human capital production function. Some of his current research projects include studying minority peer effects (education), birth order effects over a century (family), and how post-natal interventions could reduce inequality generated by prenatal health shocks (health).

I am an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of labor, family, and health. My research also involves using molecular genetics data to study economic outcomes. I received my PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee and am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Millsaps College.

When I am not doing Economics, you can find me on a tennis court trying to replicate Roger Federer.

I completed a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Connecticut, and my independent research is in the field of applied microeconomics with a specific focus on topics in labor and development economics.

My name is Patralekha (Pat) Ukil and I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics department at San Jose State University. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Connecticut in May 2020. My research interests are in the fields of labor, urban, health and development economics.