Dr. Melissa Siegel, the Head of our Migration and Development Research Theme, talks about our priorities, partners and impacts: http://www.merit.unu.edu/research/rt6.php

PhD fellow Martin Rehm joins us ahead of his PhD defence on 1 March 2013. The full title of his thesis is: "Unified yet separated: Empirical study on the impact of hierarchical positions within communities of learning". http://www.merit.unu.edu/about/profil...

Over the last 20 years Cambodia has cut poverty rates by a third on the back of rapid economic development; yet most of its people are still vulnerable to malnutrition, natural disasters and precarious employment. So in 2011 the Cambodian Government launched a ‘National Social Protection Strategy for the Poor and Vulnerable’ (NSPS). Our study feeds into this by probing rates of return to investments in social protection, as part of a novel approach based on a dynamic microsimulation. In partnership with UNICEF, we call for a range of instruments including cash transfers for children, social pensions, and public works programmes. Today we're joined by the co-author of the report, Dr. Franziska Gassmann.

We're joined for a pre-defence interview with PhD fellow Fulvia Farinelli, whose thesis investigates 'Natural Resources, Innovation and Export Growth: the Wine Industry in Chile and Argentina'. http://youtu.be/qhD6dEkuvBs

This time we're joined for a pre-defence interview with PhD fellow Bilal Mirza, whose thesis looks at improving access to energy for poor people living in the countryside of Pakistan. We also hear how his research can be used in other developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

http://www.merit.unu.edu/about/profile.php?id=690

We're joined for a pre-defence interview with PhD fellow Rodolfo Lauterbach, whose thesis title is 'Innovation in manufacturing from product variety and labor productivity growth to economic development in Chile'. http://www.merit.unu.edu/about/profile.php?id=1061

Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkely; and from 2013 will become an Affiliated Professor at UNU-MERIT and its School of Governance. We have a brief chat about his new book: 'A Very Short Introduction to Governance'; we ask him to explain what exactly is governance, how it's changed over the last two decades, and what we should expect from this field in the coming years

Omar Rodriguez Torres has won the Jorge Bernal award, granting 8,000 euros to support his research into the impact of entrepreneurship policies on the poor. Jorge Bernal, 1952-2010, was a Colombian activist and scholar whose life and work were dedicated to the defence of democracy and social justice. The award was established to support young researchers whose work focuses on social exclusion, poverty, inequality or inequity between the various social strata of the Colombian population. We ask Omar what the award means to him and to his work.

Today we’re joined by Carlos Cadena Gaitan, one of our PhD fellows who also coordinates our GPAC2 dual career programme. That’s our part-time PhD course, designed for people who want to combine doctoral research with a full-time job. I asked Carlos to summarize how the programme works, to explain its unique added value, and to tell us what kind of people we have on the course.

This week we spoke to Stefania Innocenti, a new PhD fellow on our Joint PhD Programme in Economics and Governance. She gave us her first impressions of the institute, city and PhD course. In terms of background, Stefania has a BA in Development Economics and International Cooperation and a MSc in Economics and Social Sciences from the University of Florence, Italy (summa cum laude). She worked for the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade, then as research assistant at the European University Institute and at the Social Security department of the UN-International Labour Organization in Geneva. In 2011, she was a consultant at the Italian Ministry of Economics and Finance in Rome. Her research interests lie on International Trade Negotiations and Lobbying Activity, European Cohesion Policy and Institutions. http://www.merit.unu.edu/permalink.php?id=776