Advisors
S.P. Kothari
Deputy Dean, Sloan School of Management
S.P. Kothari is Deputy Dean and Gordon Y Billard Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as Global Head of Equity Research for Barclays Global Investors (BGI), responsible for research supporting BGI’s active equity strategies, from 2008-09. Prior to joining BGI, S.P. was Deputy Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and earlier he was Head of the Department of Economics, Finance, and Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2005-06, he was Thomas Henry Carroll-Ford Visiting Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Dr. Kothari received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and B.E. (Hons.) from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani.
Director of the MIT Office of Global Initiatives
Dr. Arundhati Tuli Banerjee is Director of the MIT Office of Global Initiatives, where she works with MIT alumni, friends and supporters across the globe to identify, help plan and find support for MIT’s international initiatives. In this role, she also works closely with MIT President Rafael Reif, senior officers and faculty to align MIT’s global mission with the Institute’s key international partners. Dr. Banerjee also holds a Lectureship in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT, teaching European and South Asian literature and cinema, and is a Co-Director at MIT’s Center for Bilingual and Bicultural Studies. Her prior experience over her twelve years at MIT includes the Faculty Directorship of the MIT-India Program, when she worked closely with academic institutions, government, industry and private philanthropists in India to encourage and implement collaborative research between the two countries. She received her M.A. in English from Jadavpur University (1986), India and her M.A. in French Literature from Brandeis University (1988). Dr. Banerjee received a M. Phil and PhD in French Literature from Columbia University (1994). Before coming to MIT in 2000, she taught French at Tufts University. Banerjee has published in many academic journals, lectured at several academic conferences and co-directed a documentary film “The Name of the Disease” (2006) on healthcare in India, with Professor Abhijit Banerjee, MIT and Co-Director of the Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Abhijit Banerjee
Professor of Economics, MIT
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently 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 and remains one of the directors of the lab. In 2009 J-PAL won the BBVA Foundation “Frontier of Knowledge” award in the development cooperation category. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, 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 received the Infosys Prize 2009 in Social Sciences and Economics. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He is the author of three books including Poor Economics (www.pooreconomics.com), as well as a large number of articles, and is the editor of a third book. He finished his first documentary film, “The Name of the Disease” in 2006.
Global head of Policy for J-PAL
Iqbal Dhaliwal is the global head of Policy for the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) at MIT’s economics department. He works with policy makers in governments, international development organizations, foundations and NGOs around the world to ensure that development policy is driven by rigorous evidence from field research. Earlier Iqbal was a Director in the Economic Analysis practice of a consulting firm in Boston and before that a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) where he worked on many public policy issues during stints as a Deputy Secretary in a state government and Managing Director of a public sector company. Iqbal holds an MPA from Princeton University and an MA from Delhi School of Economics.
Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab
Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of computational photography, inverse problems in imaging and human-computer interaction.Recent projects and inventions include transient imaging to look around a corner, a next generation CAT-Scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion capture (Prakash), long distance barcodes (Bokode), touch+hover 3D interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (Netra,Catra), new theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena and algebraic rank constraints for 3D displays(HR3D).
In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide. In 2009, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2010, he received the Darpa Young Faculty award. Other awards include Marr Prize honorable mention 2009, LAUNCH Health Innovation Award, presented by NASA, USAID, US State Dept and NIKE, 2010, Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project Award (first place), 2011. He holds over 40 US patents and has received four Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on Computational Photography.
Assitant Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management
Professor Iyer’s research focuses on the area of banking and contract theory, with a particular interest in understanding the role of interbank markets in the provision of liquidity. Recent research projects include examining the factors that mitigate depositor incentive to run on banks and examining how market participants overcome frictions in contracting.
Iyer holds an MA in economics from Bombay University, an MSc in economics and finance from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in finance from INSEAD.