Research Fellow with the RISE Programme (Research on Improving Systems of Education), affiliated with the Blavatnik School of Government. Particular research interests in the global learning crisis, foundational skills, and the role of families in education systems.

Dr Kate Orkin is a faculty member at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. She is an applied microeconomist, working in behavioural, labour and development economics. She mainly runs large field experiments in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and South Africa, developing and testing real-world interventions in partnership with governments and NGOs. Much of Kate's research focuses on how to design social protection and active labour markets interventions to improve employment and earnings for the poorest people in developing countries. One current project, in collaboration with the NGO GiveDirectly, studies how to design large-scale cash transfer schemes to increase the productivity of beneficiaries' work. Another examines if improving the information available to the labour market improves matches between firms and workers and how this affects firms' and workers' outcomes.

I am a political economist and behavioral scientist at Stony Brook University, where I am an associate professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Behavioral Political Economy. I use behavioral game theory, experimental social science, and other methods to study fairness and social preferences, climate change mitigation, environmental policy, behavioral ethics, public opinion, and voting.

I teach in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds with applied research expertise in housing and urban inequalities, poverty, social policy, community participation, public health and social movements.