Lant Pritchett is Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In addition he is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Global Development and he has been co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics. He has been engaged in policy dialogue and projects with governments and civil society around the world, both with the World Bank and as a consultant while at Harvard, including some time as adviser to Google.org. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1983 with a B.S. in Economics and in 1988 from MIT with a PhD in Economics. After finishing at MIT he joined the World Bank, where he held a number of positions. In addition he has authored over 50 papers published in refereed journals.

(As of April 2016)

Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. Banerjee is a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He holds a Ph. D. in Economics at Harvard University. In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are Development Economics and Economic Theory. He is the author of a large number of articles and three books. Most recently, Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Asli Demirguc-Kunt is the Director of Research in the World Bank. After joining the Bank in 1989 as a Young Economist, she has held different positions, including Director of Development Policy, Chief Economist of Financial and Private Sector Development Network, and Senior Research Manager, doing research and advising on financial sector and private sector development issues. She has also created the World Bank’s Global Financial Development Report. The author of over 100 publications, Ms. Demirgüç-Kunt has published widely in academic journals. Her research has focused on the links between financial development and firm performance and economic development. Banking crises, financial regulation, access to financial services including SME finance are among her areas of research. Prior to coming to the Bank, she was an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the Ohio State University.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Center for Global Development. She is a senior adviser at Lazard and chair-elect of Gavi. She was previously the Minister of Finance in Nigeria and coordinating minister for the economy. Prior to this, she was managing director of the World Bank. She is the recipient of numerous awards including honorary doctorates from some of the world’s most prestigious universities such as Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Brown. She is chair and member of several boards and high-level global development initiatives including the UN’s Post 2015 MDGs High Level Panel, the Post-Busan Global Partnership for Development Effectiveness, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the ONE Foundation. She was educated at Harvard University and holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

(As of April 2016)