Public Program Preview: Jeffrey Sachs, Class of 1930 Fellow

Jeffrey Sachs
Director, Columbia University Earth Institute
 Ending Poverty in Our Generation: Still Time if We Try
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
4:30 PM • Room 28, Silsby Hall

Class of 1930 Fellow

Jeffrey D. Sachs, the director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University will be visiting campus this fall as the Center's Class of 1930 Fellow. Professor Sachs is one of the leading international economic advisors of his generation. For more than 20 years, he has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing.

Sachs believes that ending extreme poverty is not a dream but a practical possibility. Improvements in science, technology, and global networks make possible advances in wellbeing at unprecedented rates. Yet a high degree of social organization is needed for success. In his public lecture on October 13, he will describe the main contours of an effective global effort against poverty, hunger, and disease to the year 2025. Sachs serves as Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015.

Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change. In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the 100 most influential 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 was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is the First holder of the Royal Professor Ungku Aziz Chair in Poverty Studies, at the Centre for Poverty and Development Studies, University of Malaya. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Sachs received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard.