Jessica Leight

Bio

Jessica is a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion unit at IFPRI. Her research agenda focuses on human-capital accumulation for women and girls, and agricultural institutions and structural transformation.

Jessica has conducted or is actively conducting fieldwork in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Kenya and Mozambique.

She has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Fondation de France, USAID, the U.S. Department of Labor and a number of other donors.

Previously, Jessica served as an assistant professor of economics at American University and Williams College. She received a PhD in economics at MIT, a Master of Philosophy in economics at Oxford, and Bachelor of Arts from Yale University.