Professor Ekin Birol was appointed in September 2023 as an Associate Professor of the Practice of Development to the Global Human Development (GHD) Program at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. In her new position, Ekin will serve as the Director of the Graduate Certificate in Social Innovation and Global Development, and will oversee the Capstone project and Washington D.C. internship processes for the GHD program.  This full-time faculty position follows Ekin’s two years of service to the GHD community as an Adjunct Professor, Capstone Advisor and Global Social Innovation Lab mentor.

Prior to joining GHD, Ekin was a Research Integrity Lead with the Research, Data and Innovation team of the World Resources Institute (WRI).  In that position, she worked across WRI's systems, programs, countries and regions to support the development of high technical quality and ethically sound research and publications.  From 2000 to 2021, Ekin worked for the CGIAR, including 15 years as a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, and three years as a Research Analyst at Bioversity International.  While at CGIAR she worked on various projects related to innovation and scaling of technological and policy solutions for tackling malnutrition, poverty, resource degradation, climate change and social exclusion.  Prior to joining the CGIAR, she was a pre-doctoral research fellow at University of London’s Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, and a post-doctoral research fellow at University of Cambridge’s Department of Land Economy. During her peri-doctoral period, Ekin conducted research on conservation of biodiversity and efficient use of water resources, and taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at the Universities of Cambridge, London and Reading.

Ekin is a prolific author with over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles, two edited volumes and numerous other publications, in the fields of environment and natural resource management, agriculture, nutrition, food systems, and economic development.  Throughout her career she has had the opportunity of working in transdisciplinary teams and across several countries in both Global South and North (most notably in Ghana, Greece, Hungary, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uzbekistan and Zambia), and from household to community, national, regional and global levels.

A dual national (Turkish and British), Ekin was born in Istanbul, and completed her PhD (Economics, 2004), MPhil (Economics, 2001), MSc (Environmental and Resource Economics, 1999) and BSc (Economics, 1998) at the University of London.