OUR TEAM

The Centre presently has six core researchers and over 40 Monash Business School academics and post-graduate students as members, along with an increasing number of non-resident international fellows.

Professor Asad Islam

Asad Islam is the Director of CDES and a Professor at the Department of Economics at Monash University. He has extensive experience working in the field to implement academic and policy-relevant research including the economics of education and health, food security, energy, disaster and environment, technology adoption, gender, microfinance, social networks, and corruption. His research spans several developing countries including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, China, Cambodia, Uganda, and Tanzania. Asad has been published extensively in leading economics and public policy journals, and has attracted many competitive international grants, such as from the Australian Research council (ARC), UK Research Council (ESRC), DFID, AusAID (DFAT), International Growth Centre (IGC), European Commission, and World Bank.

He is currently collaborating with leading NGOs and institutions in Bangladesh to address a number of emerging challenges on COVID-19 issues. He has given interviews in different media and written on broader public policy responses on COVID-19 in developing countries.

Professor Sisira Jayasuriya

Sisira Jayasuriya is a Professor of Economics and former Director of CDES. His current research is on trade and macroeconomic issues in Asia, agriculture and food security, gender and development, and natural disasters. He has held previous appointments at the International Rice Research Institute, the Australian National University, Melbourne University and La Trobe University, He is Distinguished Fellow, Institute of Policy Studies, Sri Lanka, NonResident Senior Fellow, National Council of Applied Economic Research, New Delhi and Honorary Professor Institute of Social and Economic Studies, Osaka University.

Note: Sisira formally retired from academic life in the second half of 2022. We send him our best wishes as he enjoys his well-earned retirement!

Associate Professor Gaurav Datt

Gaurav Datt is an associate professor at CDES. Gaurav joined Monash University in 2011 with over twenty years of research and operational work experience in the development sector, including research positions at the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). His research focuses on poverty, income distribution, education, labour and social policy issues, and his work encompasses several countries including India, China, Egypt, Laos, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste. He has published widely in development and applied economics journals.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR WANG-SHENG LEE

Wang-Sheng Lee is an Associate Professor at CDES. Wang joined Monash in 2021 and has previously held academic positions at Deakin, RMIT and the University of Melbourne. He has also previously worked as a social policy consultant at Abt Associates in the US where he was involved with welfare reform evaluations using large scale experiments. His research interests include applied micro-econometrics, development economics, environmental pollution, health and labour economics and the Chinese economy. He has published widely in leading journals including the Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Demography, Economics and Human Biology, Empirical Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Population Economics, and Oxford Economic Papers. He is the recipient of the 2012/2013 Lawrence R. Klein Award from Empirical Economics, a biannual prize awarded for the best paper published in the journal.

Dr Emilia Tjernstr M

Emilia Tjernström joined CDES in 2022 as Senior Research Fellow. She has previously held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the University of Sydney. Her research draws on insights from behavioural economics and employs econometrics, field-, and lab-in-the-field experiments to examine a variety of topics within development economics. In recent interdisciplinary work, she collaborates with atmospheric scientists to improve access to and analysis of air quality data in sub-Saharan Africa. Towards this goal, she co-founded AfriqAir, a research network that has to date deployed over 50 low-cost sensors and reference-grade monitors in 11 African countries.

Her work has been cited by the Economist and she has raised over US$6 million in grant funding from a variety of sources, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and USAID. Her work has been published in the Journal of Development Economics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, World Development, and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among others. Her article “Money matters: the role of income and yields in agricultural technology adoption” received the 2020 Outstanding article award from the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Dr Umair Khalil

Umair Khalil is a Senior Research Fellow at CDES. Umair joined the CDES in 2021 and has previously held academic positions at the University of Adelaide and West Virginia University in the United States before moving to Australia in 2017. His research interests lie in health economics, development economics and political economy as well as in developing new econometric methods for causal inference. Some past work has explored social interactions in voting behavior in India, effect of exposure to terrorist activity on child health in Pakistan, and role of marriage customs and institutions on female autonomy in the South Asian region. His research has been published in the Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, among others.

Armand Sim is a Research Fellow at CDES. His research interests span issues in development economics, health economics, and public economics. He uses experimental and non-experimental methods in his works. He has evaluated the impacts of health insurance subsidy on health insurance enrollment and health care utilization in Ghana. In other work, he evaluates local government responses to local price shocks attributed to import rice restriction in Indonesia. In an ongoing work, he is involved in evaluating the impacts of providing various financial and non-financial interventions on COVID-19 vaccine promotion in Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia. His work has been published in World Development.

Shahab Sazegar was the Centre Coordinator for CDES in 2022 supporting the effective operation of CDES. In late 2022, he transitioned to a new role at Monash Business School as the impact labs coordinator.

Monisha Biswas is Centre Coordinator for CDES and joined CDES in early 2023. She helps CDES function effectively by offering a wide range of professional and administrative services. She has a PhD in information technology from Monash University. She has previously worked as a research manager in large international development organisations including Oxfam, ActionAid and UNDP. She wrote her PhD thesis on “The role of mobile technologies in the sustainability of women-led micro-enterprises and women’s empowerment in rural Bangladesh.”