Events

Nirupam Bajpai, Director, Columbia Global Center | East Asia

John H. Coatsworth, Interim Provost; Dean, School of International and Public Affairs; Columbia University

Linda P. Fried, Dean, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

Robert C. Lieberman, Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Ricardo Lagos was president of Chile from 2000 to 2006 and the former UN special envoy for climate change.  He is the former co-chair of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington and an editorial board member of Americas Quarterly.  Currently a professor-at-large at Brown University, he lives in Santiago, Chile, where he is chairman of Fundacion Democracia y Desarrollo.

Director of the Institute of Public Policy at the School of Economics at the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago- Chile

He has conducted extensive research on schools in Chile and has also been active in the politics of educational policy reform. He is currently the Director of the Public Policy Institute at the School of Economics at the Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Chile.  His research focuses on education policy, school choice, public opinion, and urban policy.  He has written books, journal articles, monographs, and reports comparing various aspects of education cross-nationally for both Chilean and international audiences. He teaches graduate courses on survey research methods and education policy.  He is also currently a member of the OECD-PISA Questionnaire Expert Group (QEG).  Elacqua has also been active in the world of education policy. He was the senior adviser to the Minister of Education in Chile between 2003 and 2006.  He has also served as an adviser to a senator in the Education Committee in the Chilean Senate.  He has been very involved in the design of the education reforms signed into law in recent years.  He has also consulted with the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and a number of national governments on education policy. Elacqua’s work on education policy has been covered in the Chilean print and broadcast media. He has also given talks to a wide variety of audiences, including academics, policymakers, unions, and educators. He holds a PhD in Politics and Public Policy from Princeton University, an MIA from SIPA at Columbia University, and a BA from Boston University.

*A month ago was agreed a joint-venture between SIPA -through the Columbia Global Center Latin America in Santiago, Chile- and the recently-created Public Policy Institute at the School of Economics at the Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Chile, which Gregory directs.

William H. Kilpatrick Professor of Economics & Education at Teachers College
 

William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, a nonpartisan entity. He is also the David Jacks Professor Emeritus of Higher Education and Economics at Stanford University where he served from 1968-99 after working as an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. He is a specialist in the economics of education and human resources and has published 16 books and almost 300 articles on these and related subjects. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Tel Aviv, a Distinguished Visiting Professor atBeijing University, and a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He has served in Fulbright Professorships at the University of Barcelona, Autonoma, and at the Universidad Metropolitana de Mexico, and as Wei Lun Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Levin hold a B.S. in Marketing and Economics, New York University and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics, Rutgers University. Most recent books are: Cost-Effectiveness Analysis: Methods and Applications (Sage Publications, 2000), Privatizing Education (Westview, 2001), and Privatizing Educational Choice, 2005..

Professor of Economics at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs, and Economics at Columbia University. His research focuses on educational topics including the effects of school choice on stratification and school quality. Urquiola also serves as a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources. He held prior appointments at the Russell Sage Foundation, Cornell University’s economics department, the World Bank’s research department, the Bolivian government, and the Bolivian Catholic University.

Miguel Urquiola holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he founded the Center for Jazz Studies.  Professor O’Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: a Black Odyssey. He also edited or co-edited The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Uptown Conversation, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and several other volumes. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, Callaloo, and American Scholar.  For his curation of the Smithsonian record set, The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award.  Since 2009, O’Meally has co-curated exhibitions at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Dr. Sylvie Laurent is a cultural historian, W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at Harvard University, and visiting fellow at Stanford.  She teaches at Sciences-Po and Columbia Reid Hall.  She specializes in African American literature and culture and, more broadly, her research examines how race and class are inextricably intertwined in America.  She has published in various outlets, notably in La revue d’études américaines, Cahiers d’études africaines, Le Monde, and La Vie des Idées.  Her first book, Homérique Amérique, was published in 2008 (Le Seuil) and her forthcoming book, White Trash, la pauvreté odieuse du Blanc américain, will be published by Sorbonne University Press in October 2011.

Charles Armstrong is a specialist in the modern history of Korea and East Asia, Professor Armstrong has written or edited numerous books on modern and contemporary Korea, including The Koreas; The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950; Korea at the Center: Dynamics of Regionalism in Northeast Asia; Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State; and Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950 - 1990 (forthcoming 2012). He is currently writing a history of modern East Asia for the Wiley-Blackwell series "Concise History of the Modern World." Professor Armstrong is also a frequent commentator in the U.S. and international media on Korean, East Asian, and Asian-American affairs.