Karen Macours is a professor at the Paris School of Economics and researcher at INRAE. Her research focuses on social programs, early childhood development, rural poverty, and agriculture in developing countries. She is the chair of the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment of CGIAR, co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics, and co-chair of the JPAL health sector. She previously was associate professor of international economics at SAIS- Johns Hopkins University and received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley