I am a professor and researcher focused on peace and conflict studies. My main interest is exploring and understanding the role of universities and other higher education institutions as peacebuikding actors, both globally and in their own communities.

Muhammad Badiuzzaman is currently working as Research Coordinator, at the Centre for Peace and Justice, Brac University. His area of research interest includes peace and conflict, social justice, refugee-statelessness, and political economy analysis. By training he is an economist and he has proven expertise in managing large scale surveys and analysing quantitative data by applying advanced statistical techniques. As research coordinator, he has been playing an important role in the area of partnership with academic institutions, building research capacity, donor liaison, and fund raising. He is responsible to oversee various research activities of the centre to ensure smooth implementation and quality of the works. He actively organises conference, seminar, workshops, public lecture, and policy advocacy with national and international stakeholders. Earlier, he received two research grants from the United Nations University-World Institute of Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). As recognition to his research, he was given ‘Best Research Paper Award’ in 2010 at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Netherlands. He regularly publishes his research works in journals and edited volumes. Some of his notable publications are; ‘Fiscal Capacity, Democratic Institutions and Social Welfare Outcomes in Developing Countries’, Journal of Defence and Peace Economics (2020); ‘Improving Maternal Health Care in a Post Conflict Setting: Evidence from Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh’ in Journal of Development Studies (2018); and ‘Conflict and Livelihood Decisions in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh’ in an edited volume ‘Poverty Reduction Policies and Practices in Developing Asia’ published by Springer (2016).

I am an Assistant Professor in Modern Latin American History at Leiden University. I hold a PhD in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies. My research deals with the gendered, racialised and generational impacts of targeted social protection programmes. The efficacy of social assistance in achieving quantifiable development outcomes has received much attention while turning a blind eye to the broader systemic consequences of these programmes. My research moves beyond policy evaluations of such outcomes. Instead, it seeks to explore the potential role of social protection in perpetuating rather than attenuating existing exclusion and power differentials in Latin America, reproducing various forms of discrimination, domination, oppression, and social fragmentation. It also addresses the normative and material dimensions of redistributive social policies in a context of limited fiscal capacity, engaging with critical questions regarding the financing of social policies and programmes including high levels of indebtedness in the region next to tax evasion. In my most recent paper, Falling through the cracks: digital infrastructures of social protection in Ecuador, published in Development and Change (2021), I study the politics of exclusion and inclusion that permeate digital infrastructures, particularly data infrastructures such as social registries, that are used to target Ecuador's most prominent social assistance programme, Bono de Desarrollo Humano, and the COVID-related programme Bono de Protección Familiar. While in my paper, Institutionalising Segregation: Women, Conditional Cash Transfers, and Paid Employment in Southern Ecuador, Population and Development Review (2019), I question perversity claims associated with cash transfers and flag processes of gender segregation in the labour market. My research contributes to interdisciplinary work on development studies, with a focus on social policy. Situated within development studies and informed by political economy, anthropology of the state, and sociology of gender and race; it seeks to understand how social policy shapes social and political identities. To that aim, I have adopted an intersectional approach, attentive to gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity. Most of my empirical research has focused on Ecuador, though I have written more broadly about Latin America.

Juliana Freire is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at New York University. She was the elected chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), served as a council member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC), and was the NYU lead investigator for the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, a grant awarded jointly to UW, NYU, and UC Berkeley. She develops methods and systems that enable a wide range of users to obtain trustworthy insights from data. This spans topics in large-scale data analysis and integration, visualization, machine learning, provenance management, and web information discovery, and different application areas, including urban analytics, predictive modeling, and computational reproducibility. Freire has co-authored over 200 technical papers (including 11 award-winning publications), several open-source systems, and is an inventor of 12 U.S. patents. According to Google Scholar, her h-index is 61 and her work has received over 16,000 citations. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAS Fellow, and a recipient of an NSF CAREER, two IBM Faculty awards, and a Google Faculty Research award. She received the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2020. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, AT&T Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM. She received a B.S. degree in computer science from the Federal University of Ceara (Brazil), and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.