Jeffrey Sachs

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project (www.unmillenniumproject.org) and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance (www.millenniumpromise.org), a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty. From 1998 to 2002, Prof. Sachs was Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Professor Sachs is in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing while ensuring environmental sustainability. He has been a senior advisor to governments in all parts of the world, and has worked with international agencies, businesses, and humanitarian organizations to forge new strategies for sustainable development. As Director of the Earth Institute, Prof. Sachs leads a large-scale effort to integrate the sciences including climatology, hydrology, engineering, economics, geography, and public health into a new field of sustainable development. In this capacity, he has helped to launch major new education programs, public outreach, and public policies, to promote the practical application of inter-disciplinary knowledge to solve global problems. Sachs is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (www.commonwealthsachs.org) (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (www.earth.columbia.edu/pages/endofpoverty/index) (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has twice been named among the 100 most influential www.earth.columbia.edu/sitefiles/File/about/director/documents/Time_100_... ) leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honor bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007. Sachs lectures regularly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2007). Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A.(1976), M.A. (1978), and Ph.D. (1980) degrees at Harvard University.