Tavneet Suri, co-chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) agriculture sector and J-PAL affiliated professor, shares insights in into her path of becoming a development economist. Inspired through her childhood in Kenya and subsequent studies at Yale, she got inspired to work in development in her home country. Her research has heavily focused on mobile money and she is currently conducting a long-term study on a universal basic income intervention in Kenya. As a development economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, she teaches classes on the private sector's role in development, which provides value to students interested in starting businesses in developing economies. She is the former editor-in-chief of VoxDev, a platform for disseminating development research, and encourages contributions from scholars. Now, with more time on her hands, she plans to focus on new research projects, including one involving genetically engineered bacteria to improve yields in Africa.
