Executive Director, ideas42
Opening Keynote Speaker

Josh Wright is the Executive Director at ideas42, a leading behavioral design firm. Josh previously led the Office of Financial Education and Financial Access at the United States Department of Treasury. Previously, Josh held positions at the Center for Community Change, Booz Allen and Hamilton’s Commercial Management Consulting business, and was a Senior Executive at Bertelsmann’s Random House, Inc. He has extensive experience in the for-profit, non-profit, and public sectors; industry experience in financial services, media and entertainment, housing, and youth development; and function expertise in business strategy, new business development, and new venture creation.

Josh has also been a visiting lecture at the Princeton Woodrow Wilson School, serves on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Behavior, and is a frequent public speaker on applied behavioral science. He holds a BA in Economics from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management.

Mayor of New Haven
Closing Keynote Speaker

Justin has a wealth of experience in government. He served for four years on the New Haven Board of Alders where he was a champion for residents across the city who felt unheard, underserved, and unsupported by the City of New Haven. He advocated for renters who lived in sub-standard apartments under absentee landlords, and fought against predatory landlords. With his constituents’ support and at their requests, he promoted fostering more positive, community-police interaction in an underserved neighborhood in order to help mitigate neighbors’ feelings of mistrust and suspicion of police.

He successfully implemented neighborhood and economic development improvements in the Cedar Hill neighborhood to promote more business activity and improve quality of life. He promoted protections for gender identity. On the Board of Alders, Justin was also one of the strongest voices for long-term fiscal responsibility, government transparency, and smart governance. He had both one of the best attendance records on the Board, and the best response rates for constituent service requests.

Justin’s government experience started long before his involvement at the Board of Alders. Justin worked for five years as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. State Department. He was posted to Washington, D.C., Taiwan, and Hong Kong. While working for the U.S. government abroad was rewarding and challenging, Justin decided to leave the State Department to come to New Haven because he wanted to live near his family, put down roots, and get involved in a local community that he believed in. Justin lives in East Rock with his wife, Natalie, and daughters Molly and April.

Justin is now the 51st Mayor of New Haven, and will work hard so that every resident has the opportunity to thrive, no matter where they live.

Executive Fellow, International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management
Opening Remarks

Andrea Levere is an Executive Fellow with the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management. She is President Emerita of Prosperity Now (formerly CFED), a private nonprofit organization with the mission of ensuring that everyone can gain financial stability, build wealth and achieve prosperity. It designs and operates major national initiatives that aim to integrate financial capability services into systems serving low-income people, build assets and savings, close the racial wealth divide and advance research and policies that expands economy mobility for all. She stepped down in August 2019 after spending 15 years as President and 27 years with the organization and is now an Executive Fellow at the Yale School of Management, hosted by the International Center for Finance in partnership with the Program for Social Enterprise. In this role, Andrea is leading an initiative focused on expanding “Equitable Finance” for the nonprofit sector, ranging from products such as philanthropic equity to strategies to expand impact investing.

In 2013, President Obama appointed Ms. Levere to the National Cooperative Bank’s (NCB) Board of Directors. She serves as the Chair of the Community Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors for 2019. She is a founding investor and the Chair of ROC USA, a national social venture that converts manufactured home parks into resident owned cooperatives. She was formerly a member of the FDIC’s Committee on Economic Inclusion, Morgan Stanley’s Community Development Advisory Board, and Capital One’s Community Advisory Council as well as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Ms. Foundation for Women. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from Yale University.

Executive Director, DataHaven
Panelist, From Redlining to Opportunity Zones: Data Applications in Connecticut’s Economic Development

Mark Abraham is the Executive Director of DataHaven, a non-profit organization with a 25-year history of public service to Connecticut cities and towns. Mark created the DataHaven Community Wellbeing Survey program, which partners with over 100 academic and health care institutions, state and local government agencies, and non-profits to produce data on well-being and economic opportunity at the neighborhood level. He is a graduate of Yale University and lives in New Haven with his wife and three children. Mark has received national awards and fellowships from the Community Indicators Consortium, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and deBeaumont Foundation, and was elected to serve on the Executive Committee of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership of the Urban Institute in Washington, DC.

Solution Leader, McKinsey Healthcare Analytics
Panelist, Healthcare in the Era of Big Data: Implications for Inclusive Community Wellbeing

Julie Anderson leads the Social Determinants of Health Center of Excellence (SDoH CoE) focusing on data and analytics related to social risk and social needs within McKinsey’s Healthcare Innovation group. She has extensive experience in analytics across the healthcare industry, including in clinical research, the pharmaceutical industry, and in consulting, where she advises payers, providers, and tech players in analytics at McKinsey. Her work at McKinsey has been focused on analytics to improve health outcomes and system efficiency for vulnerable populations, including the analytics-based design and implementation of alternative payment models and digitally-enabled platforms to improve continuity of care. She is passionate about bringing to bear both analytics and the richness of data beyond traditional healthcare sources to improve health and make the healthcare system more sustainable. She has a background in public health and epidemiology, and holds a BS in Neuroscience from Brown University and an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Founder, SeeClickFix
Panelist, Myth Busting Smart Cities

SeeClickFix's leader founded the company out of a desire to improve civic communication and the public space in his own hometown, New Haven. SeeClickFix has solved over 5 Million public space issues around the world and taken on the challenge of creating truly engaged communities and efficient government agencies. Ben is considered to be one of the first civic tech entrepreneurs and speaks frequently on the power of public communication and software to transform democracy. The White House, The World Bank, Code For America and other public agencies have looked to Ben for guidance in building their own civic tech programs. In 2019 Ben sold SeeClickFix CivicPlus where he now leads the CivicService division.

Associate Director, IDinsight
Panelist, AI for Social Good

Ben Brockman is an Associate Director at IDinsight, based in Cambridge, MA. In his role on the innovation team, Ben leads IDinsight's data science and machine learning initiative. His current work has focused on helping with Educate Girls to scale the use of machine learning to locate out of school children across Northern India and using predictive analytics to improve IDinsight’s internal data collection and research tools.

Previously, Ben spent three years with IDinsight in Asia and Africa as one of the organizations first Associates. Over those years, Ben worked on a sanitation RCT in Cambodia, a pediatric HIV care evaluation in Zambia, and on a variety of projects in India (based in Bangalore, Delhi, and Patna). Prior to rejoining IDinsight in 2017, Ben worked on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign both at headquarters and as an organizing fellow.

Ben holds a bachelor's degree in International Relations, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and an MPA in International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership.

Director, City Possible, Mastercard
Panelist, Myth Busting Smart Cities

Maddie Callis leads Mastercard's City Possible platform, a new partnership model formed to unite the private and public sectors to benefit cities and drive inclusive, sustainable growth. Maddie works closely with Mastercard’s regional teams, city governments and corporate partners to co-develop and scale urban solutions. Prior to joining Mastercard, Maddie worked at start-ups and nonprofits where she held leadership roles in operations and partnership development. She received a Master’s in Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University and served as a Rotary International Fellow in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where she worked in favelas and pursued graduate studies. She is a member of her alma mater’s, Rhodes College, Alumni Board and active advisor to the Latin American Studies program.

Manager of Programs and Population Health, Boston Children’s Hospital
Panelist, Healthcare in the Era of Big Data: Implications for Inclusive Community Wellbeing

Ayesha Cammaerts is an experienced public health leader, keenly focused on improving the health of children and families through access to quality health care and early education. She serves as the manager of programs and population health at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) Office of Community Health. In this role she leads the triennial needs assessment and strategic implementation planning process and develops population health programs supporting the communities in Boston most impacted by social and racial inequities. This includes leading the 0-5 Child Health and Development Initiative, a 10-year, $17m grant program to support kindergarten readiness across greater Boston. Ayesha worked at MassHealth supporting the implementation of the State Health Care Reform from 2005-2010. She also has experience as a Clinical Health Educator and program manager for HIV/AIDS clinics. She earned her M.B.A. in Health Care Policy and Management from the Heller School at Brandeis.

Senior Vice-President, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Panelist , From Redlining to Opportunity Zone: Data Applications in Connecticut’s Economic Development

Prabal Chakrabarti is Senior Vice-President at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in the Regional and Community Outreach department, with a mission to improve the economic well-being of low and moderate income people. He oversees a department that focuses on three main pillars: (1) revitalizing smaller cities and rural areas through the Working Cities Challenge and Working Communities Challenge; (2) improving household financial stability for all, especially by race and ethnicity; and (3) increasing employment opportunities by improving the quality of jobs and enhancing access to quality, affordable child care.

Previously, Prabal was at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, where he led a research effort to measure economic competitiveness in America’s inner cities. He served in the U.S. Treasury in economic policy and he co-wrote a UNDP report Unleashing Entrepreneurship: Making Business Work for the Poor.

Prabal holds graduate degrees from MIT and Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.S. from the University of Illinois, where he was a Truman Scholar. He serves on the boards of the Children’s Investment Fund, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health
Panelist, Data and the Environment

Dr. Kai Chen is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health) at Yale School of Public Health and the Director of Research at the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health. Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the intersection of climate change, air pollution, and human health. His work involves applying multidisciplinary approaches in climate and air pollution sciences, exposure assessment, and environmental epidemiology to investigate how climate change may impact human health. Much of this work has been done in China, Europe, and the U.S.

Senior Lecturer in Social Enterprise and Management, Yale School of Management
Moderator, From Redlining to Opportunity Zones: Data Applications in Connecticut’s Economic Development

Kate Cooney's research uses institutional theory to study the intersection of business and social sectors. Current work focuses on the cross-country comparisons of new social business legal forms, corporate supply chain transparency, social return on investment methods and inclusive economic development strategies in the American city. To understand how hybrid organizations are shaped by commercial and institutional isomorphic pressures, she has studied commercialization in the nonprofit sector, social enterprise, workforce development programs, and the emergence of new social business legal forms. She has also written broadly about market based approaches to poverty alleviation the negotiation of competing institutional logics in social enterprise organizations. Projects underway include CitySCOPE podcast, a series examining inclusive economic development in American Cities (Listen to Season 1 Charting the Opportunity in Opportunity Zones) and a MacMillan Center funded grant titled Consumer Activism and Supply Chain Transparency: Anti-Slavery Movements in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Prior to joining the faculty at Yale SOM, Dr. Cooney was on the faculty at Boston University teaching courses on nonprofit management, urban poverty and economic development, and community and organizational analysis. Kate Cooney currently serves on the Board of Directors of Dwight Hall at Yale, Center for Public Service and Justice.

Network Strategy Lead, DataKind
Panelist, AI for Social Good

Cassy L. Cox is currently the Network Strategy Lead for DataKind, a non-profit organization based in New York City, that harnesses the power of the world’s most talented volunteer data scientists to solve some of the world’s largest problems. Cassy’s work is focused on developing a strategy to create a more globally engaged, values driven and highly impactful DataKind.

Cassy’s career began with short, but formative years in both the U.S. Army and the private sector, but found her true calling when she took her first position at the International Rescue Committee a decade ago and began working in the international humanitarian and development sector. Since then Cassy has gone on to support strategic program delivery and design in sectors ranging from resilience, women’s empowerment, economic empowerment, health and nutrition and for vulnerable populations in New York City, Liberia, Kenya, South Sudan and Somalia. Cassy holds a BA in Political Science from the University at Albany and an MS in Global Affairs, International Development Economics.

Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of International Service at American University; Postdoctoral Associate at Yale
Panelist, Mobilizing Data in Politically Charged Environments: Rohingya Refugee Crisis

C. Austin Davis is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of International Service at American University and a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale. His research focuses on major transitions in developing-country labor markets and agriculture, and how such transitions interact with environmental forces. He provides academic leadership to the IPA Peace and Recovery Initiative and has overseen design and data collection for a representative panel survey of host and refugee communities in Southern Bangladesh. Austin received PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Lead Economist in Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation, World Bank
Panelist, AI for Social Good

Wolfgang Fengler is the World Bank’s Lead Economist in Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation (FCI) for the Europe and Central Asia. He also spoke at TEDx Vienna and launched population.io (endorsed by Bill Gates) as well as worldpoverty.io, two real-time big data models. The German weekly DER SPIEGEL called him a “big data virtuoso”. Previously, he served as the World Bank’s Lead Economist in the Nairobi office. A native German, Wolfgang has been a staff member of the World Bank for more than 18 years, during which he lived in four continents: First in North America working at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington DC, then in Asia as a Senior Economist in the Indonesia office, followed by Africa, and finally in Europe as part of the World Bank’s new hub in Vienna. Wolfgang has published extensively on social and economic issues. He also co-authored “Delivering Aid Differently” (with Homi Kharas, Brookings) and “Africa’s Economic Boom” (with Shanta Devarajan, Foreign Affairs). Prior to joining the World Bank, he set up Africa Consulting, LLC, and was a Fellow at the Research Institute for International Relations. Wolfgang gained a PhD from the University of Hamburg (Germany). Wolfgang loves traveling and sports, especially football. He was the football commissioner at the International School of Kenya and organized the “Nairobi Mini World Cup”, one of Kenya’s largest football tournaments for kids.

Professor, Economic Geography and Regional Planning, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Moderator, Myth Busting Smart Cities

Amy Glasmeier is professor economic geography and regional planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Glasmeier’s atlas, Poverty in America: One Nation Pulling Apart, traces the growth of poverty in the U.S. and the effects of four decades of policies to alleviate economic insecurity. The work builds off of the MIT Living Wage Calculator, which analyzes the minimum level of income required for individuals and families to pay for basic living expenses. Glasmeier also contributes to ongoing conversations in search of policies and practices enabling on technology decarbonization of the U.S. economy. Her long-standing research on technology transitions spans development pathways from the rise of regional innovation systems, to the transformation of resource-dependent local economies to the emergence of smart cities. She serves as an elected official and a practicing planner in the state of Massachusetts. Glasmeier holds a professional Masters and PhD in Regional Planning from UC Berkeley.

Assistant Professor of Finance, Yale School of Management
Panelist, Data and the Environment: Techniques for Making Sense of and Responding to Climate Change

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham's research interests include consumer & corporate finance, econometrics, and social networks. His current work focuses on assessing the costs and benefits of debtor protection policies and understanding the role that consumer debt plays in the macroeconomy. Paul's research also studies machine learning techniques applied to economics questions. Before joining Yale, Paul was a Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Swarthmore College, and a PhD in economics from the Harvard University.

Co-Founder and President, Unite Us
Panelist, Healthcare in the Era of Big Data: Implications for Inclusive Community Wellbeing

Taylor Justice, U.S. Army veteran, graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2006. He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the US Army as an Infantry Officer and later received an honorable medical discharge from active duty. An entrepreneur at heart, in 2009 Taylor co-founded HigherEchelon, Inc., a government consulting company. Taylor then co-founded Unite Us in 2013 while enrolled at Columbia Business School, where he earned his MBA in 2014. Taylor is leading Unite Us on its mission to launch coordinated care networks across all 50 states. A key architect of Unite Us’ network in North Carolina, Taylor led the Unite Us team and supported their partners in creating NCCARE360, considered by some to be the most innovative statewide healthcare transformation endeavor in the country. Driven by the belief that health begins in communities, Taylor advocates for national infrastructure that connects health and human service providers: a public utility to better support those in need.

Researcher and Lecturer, Yale School of Architecture
Panelist, Data and the Environment

Naomi Keena is an architect, interdisciplinary researcher at Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA), and lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture. Keena’s research investigates visual analytics combined with transformative building technologies as a means to study socio-ecological factors within architectural design, towards the mitigation of adverse environmental impacts. She is a co-founder of Clark’s Crow, a parametric tool that aims to promote awareness of the impact of different design options through a biophysically- based ecological accounting method in the early stages of design -development. She is also a co-founder of SEVA (Socio-Ecological Visual Analytics), a proposed new conceptual network of analytical techniques designed to quantify, visualize, characterize, and communicate socio-ecological factors within architectural designs. SEVA technology is used by, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and UN Environment’s World Environment Situation Room, and was showcased at the international Grand Challenges meetings in New Delhi, London, and Washington D.C. as well as the World Economic Forum. Keena earned a Ph.D. in Architectural Sciences from the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), NY. She is a Fulbright Fellowship recipient and has published and presented her design research widely in the areas of architecture, computer science, data visualization, systems thinking in design-driven interdisciplinary research, and environmental policy. Website: https://www.cea.yale.edu/naomi-keena

Director, Maycomb Capital
Panelist, Outcomes-Based Financing

Shelby Kohn is the Director of Public-Private partnerships at Maycomb Capital. Shelby worked for the City of New York under the Bloomberg administration for ten years. She held a range of leadership roles in the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Finance, and the Department of Small Business Services. Prior to joining Maycomb, Shelby worked for Bennett Midland, a management consulting firm for the civic sector. As a consultant, she advised mayor’s offices across the country to make a measurable impact on major challenges in their communities. She also facilitated strategic planning efforts and operational improvements for major social service organizations. Shelby received an MA in Urban Planning from Columbia University and holds a BA from Haverford College.

Associate Director, Social Finance
Panelist, Outcomes-Based Financing

Sam Kruse is an associate director at Social Finance, supporting the advisory services and social investment teams. He works with state and local governments, as well as private investors and non-profit service providers, to assess and structure Pay for Success projects. Sam is working on projects to reduce recidivism to the criminal justice system, expand access to supportive housing, and improve maternal health outcomes.

Prior to joining Social Finance, Sam was a consultant at Deloitte where he supported digital product development and market entry strategy engagements with federal, commercial, and social sector clients. He also led Deloitte’s international social impact fellowship, building growth strategies for social enterprises in Uganda and India. Sam graduated cum laude from Yale College with a BA in Economics.

Professor of Ob/Gyn and Medicine-Geriatrics at the University of Chicago
Panelist, Healthcare in the Era of Big Data: Implications for Inclusive Community Wellbeing

Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, MAPP, is a population health scientist, a practicing gynecologist and an entrepreneur. She directs the CommunityRx program of research which studies a theory-based intervention to match people to community-based supports for basic, wellness, disease self-management and caregiving needs. CommunityRx has been developed and tested with support from a Round I Health Care Innovation Award from the US Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) as well as grants from NIH and the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research. The CMMI funding had, as an expectation, that awardees implement a sustainable business model. To deliver on this commitment, she founded NowPow, LLC and MAPSCorps, 501c3, both headquartered on the South Side of Chicago where CommunityRx was developed. Dr. Lindau is also an expert on sexuality in the context of aging and illness. She founded and directs the Program in Integrative Sexual Medicine at the University of Chicago and was founding Chair of the Scientific Network on Female Sexual Health and Cancer. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, Brown University School of Medicine, the University Of Chicago Harris School Of Public Policy Studies and trained in residency at Northwestern University. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and served its National Advisory Committee. She is an Aspen Institute Health Innovator Fellow and serves its Board of Overseers. She is president of MAPSCorps and serves the board of directors of RISE, an organization devoted to the elimination of racism through sport.

Commissioner & Governor’s Senior Economic Advisor
Panelist, From Redlining to Opportunity Zones: Data Applications in Connecticut’s Economic Development

David Lehman is Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), the state agency that oversees a wide range of programs promoting business retention and recruitment, brownfield redevelopment, the arts, historic preservation and tourism. Governor Ned Lamont nominated him for the position earlier this year.

Mr. Lehman will also serve as the Governor’s Senior Economic Advisor. He is already hard at work at
creating an innovative public-private partnership between DECD and CERC known as the Partnership to Advance the Connecticut of Tomorrow (PACT), a new economic development delivery model for our state.

Mr. Lehman’s business development priorities include helping build our urban centers into engines of growth; further capitalizing on the state’s top-flight colleges and universities; strengthening the state’s workforce pipelines; and marketing Connecticut as a place that is open for business.

Prior to joining DECD, Mr. Lehman worked in the financial services industry. Most recently he was Global Head of Real Estate Finance for the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs, where he worked for 15 years.

Founder and CEO, Quantified Ventures
Panelist, Outcomes Based Financing

Eric Letsinger is the Founder and CEO of Quantified Ventures, an outcomes-based capital firm that helps clients finance specific and measurable health, social, and environmental impact. He is a “tri-sector” executive, bringing 25+ years of leadership experience in government, nonprofit, and private sector organizations operating in healthcare, environment, education, and housing. He has led transformative, public-private initiatives to drive social impact in complex, cross-sector business environments including: IBM, Baltimore Public Schools, Baltimore Housing Department, Cyveillance Software, PWC, and Samaritan Inns Homeless Services. Eric speaks regularly at dozens of conferences, events, and universities, including the Aspen Institute, Urban Institute, Yale, Duke, and the University of Virginia. He married way over his head and has two daughters who keep him humble.

Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Economics, Yale University
Panelist, Mobilizing Data in Politically Charged Environments

Paula is a co-principal investigator of the Cox’s Bazar Panel Survey (CBPS), a longitudinal study by led by the Yale MacMillan Program on Refugees, Forced Displacement, and Humanitarian Responses (PRFDHR), GAGE/ODI, and the World Bank. The CBPS aims to create a representative panel dataset on Rohingya refugees and hosts in Cox’s Bazar with a view to generating descriptive and causal evidence on the effects of the arrival of refugee influxes - and subsequent policy responses - on local economies. Other ongoing projects include a field experiment to study social triggers of violence against women and children in Bangladesh, and to understand which policies work better and why (winner of the 2019 World Bank-SVRI Development Marketplace Award), and a randomized controlled trial to study which combinations of autonomy and financial incentives are more effective in increasing the adoption of innovative educational policies among mid-level government officials (World Bank SIEF Nimble Evaluations).

Paula received a PhD in Economics from the University of Warwick and a Master’s degree in Economics from The London School of Economics. Prior to starting her doctoral studies, she worked as a consultant with the Inter-American Development Bank for four years, in Washington DC and Nicaragua. Paula’s work during that time was centered on the evaluation of conditional cash transfer programs to improve early childhood development outcomes and the development of survey instruments to measure risky health behaviors among youth.

Founder and Faculty Director, Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE); Professor of Economics, Yale University
Panelist, Mobilizing Data in Politically Charged Environments: Rohingya Refugee Crisis

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics.

Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). He holds other appointments at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the International Growth Centre (IGC) at LSE, and Innovations for Poverty Action.

Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Malawi. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the implications of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, Wired.com, BBC, Wall Street Journal, the Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.

Mobarak is currently collaborating with Evidence Action in multiple countries to replicate, test, and scale his research program that encourages rural to urban internal seasonal migration to counter seasonal poverty. This program, called No Lean Season, is supported by GiveWell.org, Good Ventures and the Global Innovation Fund, and the start-up accelerator Y-Combinator.

Clinical Associate Professor, Tufts University
Panelist, Mobilizing Data in Politically Charged Environments: Rohingya Refugee Crisis

Fernando is an environmental epidemiologist and medical anthropologist with interests in systems theory and soft systems modeling, phenomenology, Bayesian methods, complex humanitarian emergencies and spiritual-therapeutic interventions. His research interests are primarily with refugees, internally displaced populations, and asylum seekers who are survivors of torture. Fernando also works with ultra-poor populations living in informal settlements. Geographically, Fernando works in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, southern Africa and among refugee populations in Europe and North America. At Tufts, Fernando supports the dual-degree PA/MPH and BA/MPH programs, and teaches in the Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College.

Fernando holds faculty affiliations with the Department of Anthropology, Community Health, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and Race, Colonialism and Diaspora Studies. He currently is a part-time psychotherapist with the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at Boston Medical Center. Fernando is also a Dean's Fellow in the M.Div. Chaplaincy program at Boston University, School of Theology where he is pursuing a certificate in Religion and Conflict Transformation and in the process of seeking ordination. Fernando spends his time between Boston and his biodynamic farm in Vermont.

Executive Director, Citylink Center
Panelist, AI for Social Good

JJohnmark Oudersluys is the Executive Director at Citylink Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. CityLinkCenter was launched to bring a systemic solution to the persistent challenge of poverty. Working together with over 15 agencies, the collaborative has created an approach that wraps services around clients to enhance outcomes. Through the programmatic model, CityLink has created a unique set of correlated longitudinal data which they are using in conjunction with IBM and other machine learning experts to discern how to best
serve their clients and advance outcomes.

Associate Professor of Urbanism, Yale School of Architecture
Panelist, Myth Busting Smart Cities

Elihu Rubin is an architectural historian, city planner, and documentary filmmaker. He is Associate Professor of Urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture with an appointment in the Department of American studies. He is the author of Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (Yale Univ. Press, 2012). As a professor at Yale, he has executed a range of community-based public scholarship projects around the topics of architecture, urban space, preservation, and memory, including “Interactive Crown Street,” “Excavating the Armory,” and the “New Haven Industrial Heritage Trails.”

Environmental Innovation Fellow, Yale Center for Business and the Environment
Moderator, Data and the Environment

Ben Soltoff is the Environmental Innovation Fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. He works with students to explore how new ideas, technologies, and business models can address the world’s most pressing environmental problems.

Ben holds a dual master’s degree from the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. As a student, he was dedicated to building Yale’s ecosystem for environmental innovators, and he is excited to be continuing that effort as a full-time fellow.

Outside of Yale, he has worked for several environmentally relevant start-ups, ranging from a social enterprise in Mexico installing off-grid solar energy to a tech company in Silicon Valley building energy-efficient ovens that cook with light. He also has experience working on international climate policy at World Resources Institute as well as grassroots climate resilience initiatives in rural India.

Along with his Yale MBA-MEM degree, Ben holds a Bachelor of Science from Duke University.

In his spare time, he enjoys getting deeply fascinated with a good book, obscure animal facts, or whatever shiny object, concept, or person happens to hold his attention.