IAD Core Faculty
N’Dri Thérèse Assié-Lumumba
Professor, African and African Diaspora
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Faculty
- IAD Core Faculty
- IAD Advisory Council
Contact
Email: n.assie-lumumba@cornell.edu
Phone: 607-255-7839
Kota Watanabe
Independent Scholar
Kota Watanabe is a diplomat-turned-political scientist studying contested state building and civil war in contemporary Myanmar, currently based in New York City. He earned his PhD in Development Studies from SOAS University of London in February 2025.
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Postdoc
- IAD Core Faculty
- SEAP Faculty Associate in Research
Contact
Email: 683832@soas.ac.uk
Naminata Diabate

Associate Professor, Comparative Literature
A scholar of sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, Diabate’s research explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, cinema, and new media. Her book Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa (Duke UP, 2020) won the 2021 Best Book Award from the African Studies Association.
Additional Information
Edward Mabaya

Senior Research Associate
Ed Mabaya is a scholar and a development practitioner with more than two decades of experience working on development, agribusiness value chains and food security issues with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Global Development where his teaching, research and outreach work focuses on economic development in Africa.
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Faculty
- IAD Core Faculty
- IAD Advisory Council
Contact
Email: em37@cornell.edu
Phone: (607) 280-0264
Rachel Beatty Riedl

Former Director, Einaudi Center
Additional Information
Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue

Professor, Global Development
Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue is a professor of global development in CALS. His research agenda broadly addresses the interrelationships between population, social change, and sustainable development. Under this general theme, his current projects study the effects of contemporary demographic changes on global inequality, education, youth employment, health, food security and internal conflicts.
Additional Information
Steven Kyle

Associate Professor, Applied Economics and Management
Steven Kyle is an associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management. He works in the areas of macroeconomic policy in the United States and in low-income countries. His recent work includes studies of the economies of Portuguese-speaking African countries, the outlook for the U.S. economy, and issues in the management of transition economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Additional Information
Rachel Bezner Kerr

Director, Institute for African Development
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Faculty
- IAD Core Faculty
- IAD Director
- IAD Advisory Council
- Einaudi Faculty Leadership
Contact
Email: rbeznerkerr@cornell.edu
Phone: 607-255-3213
Sandra Greene

Professor, African History
Sandra Greene's research interests have ranged widely over the past 40 years, from the study of gender and ethnic relations in West Africa to the role that religious beliefs, warfare, and the experience of slavery have played in the lives of individuals and communities in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ghana. Most recently, she has focused on constructing the biographies of both ordinary and extraordinary women and men from southeastern Ghana.
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Faculty
- IAD Core Faculty
- IAD Advisory Council
Contact
Email: seg6@cornell.edu
Phone: 607-255-6682
David E. Sahn

Professor, Division of Nutritional Sciences
David E. Sahn is an international professor of economics in the Division of Nutritional Sciences and the Department of Economics. Since 2015, he has been a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. In 2017, he became a senior fellow at the Foundation for International Development Study and Research (FERDI) in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
Additional Information
Program
Role
- Faculty
- IAD Core Faculty
- IAD Advisory Council
Contact
Email: des16@cornell.edu
Phone: 607-255-8931