Nicolas Ajzenman
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics. PhD, Sciences Po.
Nicolas Ajzenman is an Assistant Professor at McGill (Economics Department) and an affiliated professor at J-PAL and IZA. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at the Sao Paulo School of Economics-FGV.
Ajzenman is an applied microeconomist, working at the intersection of development economics, behavioral economics, and political economy. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in top scientific journals such as the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, The Journal of Law and Economics, Economics of Education Review, and Health Economics.
He was a Visiting Scholar in the Behavioral Economics Group of the Inter-American Development Bank and he has also worked and consulted for multilateral development organizations, such as the World Bank and the EBRD.
He holds a Ph.D. in Economics (Sciences Po), a Master in Public Administration-International Development (Harvard University), a Master's degree in Economics (Universidad de San Andres), and a BA in Economics (Universidad de Buenos Aires).
Sabine Cadeau
Associate Professor, Department of History
Sabine Cadeau is a historian of Modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research and teaching interests include the early modern Atlantic World as well as modern Latin American and Caribbean history. Her first book More Than a Massacre: Racial Violence and Citizenship in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands was published by the University of Cambridge Press Afro-Latin America series. The book traces a successively worsening campaign of explicitly racialized anti-Haitian repression that began in 1919 under the American occupiers, accelerated in 1930, with the rise of Trujillo, and culminated in 1937 with the slaughter of an estimated twenty thousand civilians. In 2023 More than a Massacre was awarded the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award and the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Her second manuscript, Bonds and Bondage: Financial Capitalism and the Legacies of Atlantic Slavery at the University of Cambridge is forthcoming with the University of Cambridge Press. This book illustrates the ways in which the University of Cambridge accumulated wealth from Atlantic Slavery through colonial financial instruments. Through this study she demonstrates that the University of Cambridge benefitted economically from enslavement at multiple levels and was transformed by the colonial capitalism of the early modern era in multiple highly visible ways. Sabine is also currently preparing another monograph on the 1937 Haitian Massacre titled Victims in Their Own Words: Remembering the Forgotten 1937 Haitian Massacre. This book project builds on her oral history fieldwork on the 1937 Haitian Massacre and centres survivors’ detailed accounts and interpretation of the event.
Oliver Coomes
Professor, Department of Geography. PhD, Wisconsin-Madison
Oliver Coomes is Professor of Geography at McGill University who works on issues related to environment and development in tropical rainforest forests and forest communities of Amazonia and elsewhere in tropical Latin America, including peasant livelihoods, poverty traps, land cover change, adaptation to environmental change, and agrobiodiversity. He served as Editor-in-Chief of World Development (2003-2012). His published work includes more than 100 journal articles in a wide range of thematic and interdisciplinary journals and one co-authored book.
Franque Grimard
Associate Professor, Department of Economics. PhD, Princeton
Dr. Franque Grimard is an Associate Professor of the Department of Economics at McGill University. He is also an associate member of the McGill Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) and a member of the Centre for Population Dynamics (CPD). He has been teaching Economic Development at the B.A. Master’s and Ph.D. levels for the last 25 years. His research specialties are Development, Health and Environment Economics, where he is interested in the application of statistical analysis and data collection to applied policy issues such as poverty and social protection, health, gender empowerment, sustainable development and public finance management. Professor Grimard’s research on health focuses on the social-economic determinants of health. In particular, it analyses the long-term impact of shocks for the health of individuals and the cost effectiveness of health programs to improve the living standards of poor women in Peru. His health work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and in the Journal of Health Economics. His work on economic development has been published in the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, World Development, and the Review of Development Economics. His research on sustainable development and environment has been published in Ecological Economics and Environmental and Resource Economics. His current research projects look at the pathways to women’s political participation in Myanmar, and at how women in Paraguay form individual and common beliefs around gender norms (around gender roles,gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive health and rights) and whether a norm shifting intervention program can influence these beliefs. Finally, Professor Grimard is also the president of the Canadian Development Economics Study Group (CDESG). Operating with an IDRC grant, CDESG is the main research group on development economics in Canada organizing policy panels in the area of development economics, sponsoring developing country scholars to come to CDESG conferences to present their work, building a community of researchers in Canada and abroad to produce research and applied policy in development economics for policy makers in Canada and in developing countries.
Catherine Lu
Professor, Department of Political Science
Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre, and Coordinator of the Lin Centre’s Research Group on Global Justice. She was the Associate Director of ISID from 2016-2018. Her research and teaching interests intersect political theory and international relations, focusing on critical and normative studies of intervention in world politics; global justice; reconciliation; structural injustice; alienation; colonial international order; cosmopolitanism; and the world state. In addition to numerous articles, she is the author of Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which won four international book awards, and Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). In 2018, she was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Sonia Laszlo
Professor, Department of Economics
Sonia Laszlo is Professor of Economics and specializes in Economic Development. Her research currently focuses on two broad research areas: gender and economics (and specifically the effects of social policies and conditions on women) and decision-making under uncertainty (namely concerning technology adoption among subsistence farmers). Prof. Laszlo has conducted her research in Peru, Kenya and in the Caribbean, using laboratory experiments, surveys or randomized controlled trials. She is also a member of the Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche en Organizations (CIRANO) and the Grupo de Analysis para el Desarrollo (GRADE). In 2005 she co‐founded and has since been an executive member of the Canadian Development Economics Study Group (CDESG), which groups both academic and policy development economists in Canada. She is an Associate Member of the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID). Previously, she was ISID’s Associate Director (2013-2016) and Director (2016-2019).
Pedro Monaville
Associate Professor, Department of History and Classical Studies
Pedro Monaville is a historian of modern Africa. His research focuses on colonial and postcolonial Congo, revolutionary movements, political subjectivities, knowledge production, popular culture, memory work, and the connections between visual arts and history. His first book, Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo was published by Duke University Press in 2022. The book focuses on student activism in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s and 1970s. Through their activism and intellectual work, students introduced and mediated new ideas about culture, politics, and the world. In this book, Monaville shows how students reimagined the Congo as a decolonized polity by connecting their country to global discussions about revolution, authenticity, and equality.
Professor Monaville is currently working on three new research projects: a history of the decolonization of the Catholic church in the Congo, a study of knowledge production in postcolonial Africa centered around the trajectory of the late Congolese scholar Tshikala Kayembe Biaya, and a book about Belgian colonialism in the interwar years.
Madhukar Pai
Professor, McGill School of Population and Global Health
Prof Madhukar Pai, MD, PhD, FCAHS, FRSC is the Inaugural Chair, Department of Global and Public Health at the McGill School of Population and Global Health. He holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology & Global Health. He was previously Director of the McGill International TB Centre. He is Editor-In-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Madhu Pai did his medical training and community medicine residency in Vellore, India. He completed his PhD in epidemiology at UC Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the UCSF.
Madhu serves on the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group for TB in the South-East Asia Region, and the WHO Advisory group on Tuberculosis Diagnostics and Laboratory. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of FIND, Geneva. He serves as the Chair of the Public-Private Mix (PPM) Working Group of the Stop TB Partnership. He serves on the editorial boards of Lancet Infectious Diseases, PLoS Medicine, and BMJ Global Health, among others. He is Editor-In-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health.
Madhu’s research is mainly focused on improving the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, especially in high-burden countries like India and South Africa. His research is supported by grant funding from the Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. He has more than 400 publications. He is recipient of the Union Scientific Prize, Chanchlani Global Health Research Award, Haile T. Debas Prize, and David Johnston Faculty & Staff Award. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
Paola Perez Aleman
Associate Professor, Desautels Faculty of Management. PhD, MIT
Dr. Paola Perez-Aleman is Associate Professor of Strategy and Organization at McGill University. Her research and expertise lies at the intersection of management, strategy, and international development. The focus of her work is on the processes that build capabilities of enterprises, foster innovation, and advance economic development. Specifically, Dr. Perez-Aleman examines how clusters and inter-firm networks emerge and grow; how local enterprises in developing countries build production and innovation capabilities; and how vulnerable groups in low-income contexts and global value chains are included in the shift to sustainable production practices. Her research explores organizational and institutional processes that foster equity, inclusive innovation, poverty alleviation, and sustainability. Professor Perez-Aleman earned her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her B.Sc. degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
Isabel Pike
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Isabel Pike is a sociologist whose research focuses on gender, development, and inequality. After receiving her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020, she served as an Assistant Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. In summer of 2023, Dr. Pike joined the Sociology department at McGill. Her current book project explores the contested narrative in Kenya that “the boy child has been forgotten” as a means to understand gender backlash as well as the ways that development discourse can be repurposed. The book explores the narrative from a variety of vantage points: how it circulates in the media, how it resonates on the ground, and how NGOs and other policy actors put it into action. Another stream of Dr. Pike’s research draws on quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how gender and economic status shape the life course, particularly in the realms of relationships and work. Born in the UK, she grew up in Uganda and prior to academia, worked for the UN World Food Programme in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Mali.
Sarah Turner
Professor, Department of Geography
Sarah Turner is a Professor in the Department of Geography, McGill University. Her research focuses on the ways by which individuals who find themselves somehow marginalised, be it economically, politically, or ethnically, make a living in rural and urban Asia. Her current projects include a focus on ethnic minority livelihoods in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands, including farmer everyday politics when faced with inappropriate agrarian programmes and infrastructure projects. She also studies informal economy livelihoods and resistance tactics of street vendors and motorbike taxi drivers in Hanoi, Vietnam. She has co-authored Frontier livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands (University of Washington Press), edited Red Stamps, Gold Stars (UBC Press) on fieldwork in socialist Asia, and co-edited Fragrant Frontier (NIAS Press) about the commodity chains of spices from Asia’s uplands. She is an editor of Geoforum, and a recent former editor of Journal of Vietnamese Studies.
https://wp.geog.mcgill.ca/sturner
Jon Unruh
Professor, Department of Geography. PhD, University of Arizona
Jon Unruh focuses on war-affected land and property rights. He has conducted research, policy and practice work in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Liberia, Somalia, Mozambique, East Timor, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Cambodia, Angola, Cameroon, Turkey, Slovenia, Jordan, Colombia, Peru, Tanzania, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and generally with the UN, World Bank, USAID, DFID, and other bilateral donors and NGOs.
Juan Wang
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science. PhD, Johns Hopkins
Juan Wang is an associate professor of political science at McGill. Her research interests are state-building at the grassroots level in China. She has primarily focused on the formation, changes, and operations of local governments, religious institutions, and coercive and legal apparatus. Her research relies on qualitative methods to explore the reality, nuance, and meaning of politics in contemporary China. Her first book, The Sinews of State Power: The Rise and Demise of the Cohesive Local State in Rural China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) traces the changes and continuity of intergovernmental relations at the grassroots level to explain the varying causes of and persistent peasant protests in China.
Jennifer Welsh
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Max Bell School of Public Policy
Professor Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect. Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, and Canadian foreign policy. Her most recent books include The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the 21st century (2016), which was based on her CBC Massey Lectures, and The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention (2015). She was a former recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and a Trudeau Fellowship, and from 2014-2019 has directed a five-year European Research Council-funded project called “The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Ethics, Law and Politics of Armed Conflict”. She is also a frequent media commentator on international affairs and Canadian foreign policy.
