The Y-RISE team will be led by Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, the founder of Y-RISE. Mobarak is Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. 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. He has been a Research Fellow in CEPR’s Development Economics programme since 2009.
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 behaviours 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, 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.