Rachel Glennerster


Rachel Glennerster is currently the Chief Economist at the Department for International Development, the UK's ministry for international development cooperation, after formerly serving on DFID's Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact. She is on leave as an affiliated researcher of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Earlier she was the Executive Director of J-PAL till 2017 and the lead academic for Sierra Leone at the International Growth Centre, a research centre based jointly at The London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. She helped establish the Deworm the World Initiative, a program that targets increased access to education and improved health from the elimination of intestinal worms for at-risk children, and has helped "deworm" millions of children worldwide.
Before joining J-PAL and the International Growth Centre, Glennerster worked as an Economic Adviser to HM Treasury, a Development Associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development, and as a Senior Economist at the International Monetary Fund. She was also a member of the United Kingdom delegation to the IMF and World Bank in the mid-1990s. Glennerster is a member of Giving What We Can, an international society for the promotion of poverty relief.
Glennerster is the coauthor of , a book on running randomized impact evaluations in practice in developing countries, and , a book that strategizes incentives for developers to undertake the costly research needed to develop vaccines.
Glennerster is cited as among the top 10% of female economists as of March 2019, according to .

Education

Glennerster received her B.A. in PPE from Oxford University in 1988. She then proceeded to obtain a Masters in Economics from Birkbeck College, University of London in 1995 and a doctorate in Economics from the same institution in 2004.

Research

Glennerster's areas of research includes and focuses on randomized trials of health, education, microcredit, women’s empowerment, and governance. Geographically, her research has spanned West Africa and South Asia, including countries such as Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Findings of her research include: