Dr. BenYishay is a development economist specializing in empirical microeconomics, geospatial impact evaluations, and randomized control trials. He heads AidData’s Research and Evaluation Unit, and oversees the AidData Research Consortium, some 120 academics at 50 universities worldwide. His current research focuses on the impacts of foreign aid programs on agriculture and deforestation as well as human health and social capital. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Nature Sustainability, Journal of Development Economics, and many other outlets.

Dr. Narayan leads Mathematica's climate change practice at the enterprise level, leveraging a team equipped with expertise across multiple sectors and experience across the globe, to design solutions at the intersection of policy, data, and technology to address climate change. Dr. Narayan has more than 20 years of experience conducting economic analysis and evaluations to support agriculture, climate change, and environmental policy. She remains laser-focused on applying principles of economic theory and behavioral economics on data to sharpen the impact of programs and policies. Her research aims to identify sustainable, cost-effective, and just policies and programs that address underlying market failures and behavioral constraints and consider distributional and equity considerations.

Rocio is an environmental scientist passionate about leveraging satellite data to address humanity’s challenges. She is a Customer Success Manager for Education & Research at Planet. Prior to that, Rocio worked for over a decade leading the development and adoption of geospatial tools for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction around the globe. Rocio’s experience spans across academia, governments, start-ups, and nonprofits. Her work has been showcased by UNDRR as well as disseminated in scientific journals and conferences.

Arif Rashid leads the Design, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Applied Learning (DMEAL) Division in the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA). The division is responsible for ensuring high-quality programming, and innovation through strategic planning and activity design, consistent and effective performance monitoring; comprehensive, appropriate, and rigorous evaluation, and purposeful learning across the full spectrum of BHA responses and programming. Arif joined USAID in 2013 and led the Monitoring and Evaluation Team in the legacy Office of Food for Peace (L-FFP) before assuming his current acting role in BHA. He led the improvement in the rigor of monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian assistance and resilience programs, including developing the M&E capacity of L-FFP and partner staff. Arif conceptualized the Refine-and-Implement and played an instrumental role in developing the model - a post-award co-creation model adopted by OAA as the best practice in USAID. He co-led the development of the sustainability approach to enable communities to maintain outcomes beyond the life of BHA programs - a process that focuses on empowering local communities and service providers to sustain the services and input delivery beyond the life of a program. He provided leadership in developing a collaborative approach to process evaluations used in several countries. Arif received his post-graduation degree from the University of Arizona. He has nearly 30 years of experience in emergency response and international development work, focusing on assessments, analysis, project design, monitoring, evaluation, and management. Before joining USAID, he worked for a global food security and nutrition project designed to increase the capacity of food security implementing agencies, networking, and knowledge management; a private contractor providing technical assistance to UN agencies and NGOs, and NGOs managing multi-sectoral food security projects.

Hanna Camp is a Director of MEL Technologies with Mercy Corps’ Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) team. Since joining Mercy Corps in 2018, she created and now leads an initiative to improve the accessibility and utilization of MEL Technology across Mercy Corps programs. The MEL Tech initiative established common organizational data technologies and standards for MEL, conducts global data technology trainings, and delivers MEL Tech implementation support reaching Mercy Corps offices in more than 40 countries. Hanna works directly with Mercy Corps teams to implement more efficient analysis pipelines and data-driven processes based on MEL Tech. She also leads multiple grant-funded projects focused on developing resources for specific thematic areas such as reduced access MEL and context analysis.

Before joining Mercy Corps, Hanna worked as a data analyst and project manager for organizations focusing on agricultural climate analytics, smallholder farming services, and long-term international trends forecasting.

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