Postdoctoral Fellows Advance
Development Engineering Research
By Rachel Strohm, DIL Graduate Student Researcher
Each year, over 1,400 scholars who have recently received their PhDs conduct research at UC Berkeley as
postdoctoral fellows. Beginning in Fall 2013, the Development Impact Lab added to this cohort of early career
researchers with a novel take on the postdoc model.
The new Global Poverty and Practice Postdoctoral Fellows (GPP Fellows) program creates a robust academic
career path for PhDs who wish to stay actively engaged in global poverty reduction. The program distinguishes
itself from many postdoc programs by encouraging its fellows to set independent research agendas focusing
on the role of technology innovation in global poverty and inequality. The fellows conduct applied research
that aims to inform development practice as well as academic discourse. Rather than being tied to a specific
department or professor, they are able to work across DIL’s interdisciplinary research network and to pursue
approaches that exemplify DIL’s mission of bridging engineering, economics, and the social sciences to create
innovative solutions to global poverty.
The inaugural fellows are Imran Ali and Kweku Op Z