Megan Sheahan is a Research Support Specialist at Cornell’s Dyson School.
Cornell University is celebrating its 150th birthday, its sesquicentennial, with lots of pomp and circumstance this year. As part of the festivities, I’ve had the unique and tremendous pleasure of working with Chris Barrett to plan the “Cornell and Global Poverty Reduction: Philanthropy, Policy and Scholarship” event during Charter Day Weekend, 24-26 April 2015.
This session will honor Cornell’s rich history of leadership in international development and poverty reduction, especially the economic dimensions of these major challenges. Kaushik Basu (Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank and Professor of Economics at Cornell) will give the keynote address. Other rock stars in our field—Debraj Ray (Professor of Economics at New York University and co-editor of the American Economic Review), Eleni Gabre-Madhin (CEO of EleniLLC and founder of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange), Erik Thorbecke (Professor Emeritus of Economics at Cornell and one of the creators of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke metric for measuring poverty), and Richard Stearns (President of World Vision and author of several best-selling books)—will take the stage for a panel discussion about Cornell’s role in their far-reaching and deeply influential work.
And, because we know that impactful global poverty reduction efforts are not carried out by these major players alone, we will also recognize the impressive work done by Cornell faculty and students more broadly. The event will conclude with the first showing of a short film featuring a handful of inspiring students from a range of disciplines who work on some facet of poverty alleviation. Both before (2:30-3pm) and after (4:30-5pm) the main event, you can then join us in Park Atrium for an expo of some of the many on-campus student groups dedicating their time and talents to development activities around the world.
In anticipation of Charter Day Weekend, several of our panelists have visited Cornell over the past year and a half. You can watch Debraj Ray’s October 2013 lecture on ethnicity and conflict here and Richard Stearns’s Beimfohr Lecture from February 2014 entitled “World View, the Meaning of Life, and the End of Poverty” here. CornellCast is also featuring interviews with our panelists, like this one with Debraj Ray.
Also check out these interviews with Richard Stearns, Erik Thorbecke, and Eleni Gabre-Madhin.
If you can make it to Ithaca for Charter Day Weekend, we hope you’ll register for and attend the global poverty reduction event on Saturday April 25th from 3-4:30 PM in Statler Hall Auditorium. Otherwise, watch the Charter Day Weekend website (and this blog’s Twitter feed, @econthatmatters) for details about joining us remotely via livestreaming.
Update 5/17/2015: The live video capture from the event can be found here.
