Nancy Birdsall

Nancy Birdsall is the Center for Global Development's founding president. From 1993 to 1998, she was executive vice president of the Inter-American Development Bank, the largest of the regional development banks, where she oversaw a $30 billion public and private loan portfolio. Before that she worked for 14 years in research, policy, and management positions at the World Bank, including as director of the Policy Research Department.

She is the author, co-author, or editor of more than a dozen books and over 100 articles in scholarly journals and monographs. Shorter pieces of her writing have appeared in dozens of U.S. and Latin American newspapers and periodicals.

Birdsall received her Ph.D. from Yale University and her M.A. from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to launching the center, she served for three years as Senior Associate and Director of the Economic Reform Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where her work focused on globalization, inequality and the reform of the international financial institutions.

The Center for Global Development is an independent think tank that works to reduce global poverty and inequality by encouraging policy change in the United States, other rich countries, and international institutions, through rigorous research and active engagement with the policy community.