is a distinguished professor of public policy at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Jishnu’s work focuses on health and education in low and middle-income countries. He has co-developed one of the largest and longest-running cohort study on learning outcomes in low-income countries and led an agenda on quality of healthcare in low-income countries. His research led to the widespread adoption of a training program for informal providers (in West Bengal), health facility inspections (in Kenya), networks for private sector providers (in India), the scale-up of quality measurement tools in health (global) and the development of financial products for private schools (global). He was also part of the team that developed India’s federal inpatient health insurance scheme, the RSBY, which reached 150 million people in 2016. Jishnu helped write the World Development Report on Gender and Development (2012) and in 2015 he was the Flander’s Visiting Professor at McGill University. He has received the George Bereday Award from the Comparative and International Education Society, the Stockholm Challenge Award for the best ICT project in the public administration category in 2006 and the Research Academy award from the World Bank in 2017 and 2013 for research on health and education. He was a member of the Lancet Commission on Covid-19 in India and a member of the state of West Bengal’s global advisory board for Covid-19. He holds degrees in economics from St. Stephen’s College (Delhi), Cambridge (U.K.) and Harvard University (USA).
