Laurence R. Simon, PhD
Founder and Center Director
Laurence Simon is Professor Emeritus of International Development and focuses on the Center's strategic planning and budget management. Simon's research focuses on critical issues of social exclusion including psychological and cultural barriers to poverty reduction and has studied the role of social movements in building emancipatory development strategies. In 2007, he took a leave from Brandeis to serve as the senior adviser on global poverty to the executive director of the Google Foundation and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. Laurence chairs the Center's work on caste systems in South Asia and their diasporas and serves as the Joint Editor-in-Chief of CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion. Laurence can be reached at simon@brandeis.edu.
Joseph K. Assan, PhD
Division Director for Political Economy of Sustainable International Development
Joseph Kweku Assan, Lead Investigator, is a political economist who researches the interaction between sustainable livelihoods, environmental variability/climate change and household well-being within the context of poverty reduction. Joseph has research expertise in the field of political economy of international development with an interest in the interaction between development theory, policy and practice in Africa and Asia. Joseph can be reached at joeassan@brandeis.edu.
Rajesh Sampath, PhD
Division Director for Justice, Rights, and Social Change
Rajesh Sampath, Lead Investigator, is a philosopher and ethicist with research interests and disciplinary expertise in twentieth century Anglo-American and European moral and political philosophy, theories of modernization and social-historical change, epistemology and the sociology of knowledge in comparative religious studies, and comparisons of Western philosophy and traditional African, Indian and Chinese philosophy. Raj’s research also compares the Anglo-American, European and Global South traditions of philosophical ethics and theories of justice. Raj can be reached at rsampath@brandeis.edu.