Alemayehu Amberbir

Visiting Scholar, Feinberg School of Medicine and Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

Contact: aleamberbir@gmail.com

Alemayehu Amberbir is a visiting scholar in the Feinberg School of Medicine with a courtesy appointment in the Roberta Buffett Institute. He will be in residence April 4–25, 2026, hosted by Dr. Lisa Hirschhorn, Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Feinberg and Director of the Ryan Family Center for Global Primary Care at the Havey Institute for Global Health. Alemayehu Amberbir is a distinguished medical epidemiologist with over two decades of academic and field research experience across Ethiopia, Malawi, Rwanda, and the UK. He is the Chair of the Center for Population Health and Associate Professor of Global Health Epidemiology at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda. His research has focused on epidemiological and implementation research addressing health systems in Africa, with a particular emphasis on evidence-based primary healthcare interventions for chronic conditions. This includes collaboration with Northwestern University, led by Professor Hirschhorn, to develop a research program targeting non-communicable diseases, healthy aging, and multimorbidity among populations aged 40 and older in Rwanda. While at Northwestern, he aims to build on his ongoing work on healthy aging and multimorbidity in Rwanda to develop a follow-up research project.

Roberson Alphonse

Visiting Lecturer, Medill School of Journalism and Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

Contact: roberson.alphonse@northwestern.edu

Roberson Alphonse is a visiting lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism in residence from January 2025 to December 31, 2025. Roberson is a Haitian media professional and serves as the head of national news at Le Nouvelliste, the newsroom director at Magik 9 and the producer of the Dèyè Kay program. He reports on sensitive subjects and challenges facing the country, including corruption, human rights, and socio-political crises in Haiti. In addition to his investigative journalism, Roberson works to train the next generation of journalists in Haiti and is working on his first book, an anthology retracing his 20 years of journalism.

Haula Noor

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Haula Noor is in residence from January 19 through February 28, 2026 and is hosted by Brannon Ingram, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Faculty Associate with the Roberta Buffett Institute's Equality Development & Globalization Studies (EDGS) Program. Noor is a lecturer and the Secretary of the Doctoral Program at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia (UIII). She also serves as the Co-Director of the Center of Islam & Global Challenges at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, UIII. Apart from this position, she is the Program Director on Good Governance at KiPRAH Indonesia and is a researcher at the Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat, UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta. Previously, Noor was a research fellow at the ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore. She earned her PhD in International, Political, and Strategic Studies from the Australian National University (ANU), focusing on the role of family dynamics in jihadist radicalization. Her expertise encompasses gender and terrorism, family psychology, Islamic studies, and the intersection of Islam, security, and democratic governance. Noor has published extensively on issues of radicalization, religious authority, and women's roles in terrorism. During her appointment, Haula will work on shifting her PhD dissertation on "The Family Context and Its Role in Making Jihadists in Indonesian" into a publishable monograph.

Bronwyn Rae

Visiting Scholar

Contact: brae@northwestern.edu

Bronwyn Rae is in residence through July 15, 2027 and is hosted by Deborah Cohen, Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute. Rae received her medical degree from Sydney University and her MPH from Northwestern University, where she specialized in pediatric anesthesiology. She has a long-standing interest in anesthesia in under-resourced environments and has worked in the Solomon Islands, Pakistan, and Inner Mongolia with local anesthesia providers. Since 2013, she has worked closely with anesthesia faculty in Tanzania to improve anesthesia training there. She was honored for this work with an award for services to pediatric anesthesia at the 2025 annual meeting of the Society of Anesthesiologists in Tanzania.  

Inaya Rakhmani

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Inaya Rakhmani is a visiting scholar in residence from January 5–19, 2026 and is hosted by Laura Hein, Director of the Arryman Scholars Program within the Roberta Buffett Institute’s Equality Development & Globalization Studies Program (EDGS) Program and Harold H. & Virginia Anderson Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her visit is supported by a Buffett Global Collaboration Grant.

Rakhmani is the Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI). She uses cultural political economy to study media and communications as well as knowledge and information to explain broader capitalist changes. She researches the role of social and mass media in hindering democratic developments in Indonesia, with comparisons to India, Egypt, and Turkey from 2015 to the present day. Since 2014, she has been mapping the structural barriers of social scientists to carry out critical research in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. She has also been actively engaging with local, national, and global policy makers to make the issue better known. She is the author of Mainstreaming Islam in Indonesia: Television, Identity and the Middle Class, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2016. She is currently finalizing a study on social sciences and policy responses in Southeast Asia (eleven countries) in partnership with the Global Development Network and the International Development Research Centre.

Vijayendra (Biju) Rao

Distinguished Practitioner-Scholar in Residence

Website: vijayendrarao.org

Vijayendra (Biju) Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank and a scholar of development whose work bridges research and practice. In July 2026, after more than 25 years at the Bank, he will transition to a new phase of independent scholarship, with a continuing focus on interdisciplinary, people-centered approaches to development. In addition, in spring 2026, Rao will join the Institute's Elliott Scholars course as a Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner in Residence.

Rao studies how social, cultural, and political contexts shape the lives of people living in poverty. Trained as an economist but deeply influenced by anthropology, sociology, and political science, he is known for integrating qualitative and quantitative methods to make economics more reflexive, contextual, and grounded in lived experience. His early work helped establish the economics of dowries, domestic violence, and sex work as fields of empirical inquiry. His 2004 edited volume with Michael Walton, Culture and Public Action, catalyzed influential interdisciplinary debates on aspirations, inequality traps, and cultural heritage. 

A long-standing contributor to research on political economy and democratic decentralization in India, Rao has recently advanced new methods for analyzing large-scale qualitative data. His experimentation with AI and natural language processing has produced novel insights into aspirations, well-being, and narrative expressions of agency among people in low-income settings. He is the co-author, with Ghazala Mansuri, of Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?, and with Paromita Sanyal, of Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies. From 2010 to 2020, Rao led the World Bank’s Social Observatory, an initiative that embedded researchers within large-scale anti-poverty programs to strengthen their adaptive capacity and promote learning-oriented, context-sensitive development practice.

Georgia Rose

Visiting Scholar, Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies, Program of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

Georgia Rose is in residence from December 10, 2025 through January 7, 2026. She is hosted by the Roberta Buffett Institute in partnership with the Weinberg College Center for International and Area Studies and the Program of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Professor Rose is a Lecturer for the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the West Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies, where she also coordinates the Undergraduate Psychology Program. Additionally, she is the Senior Clinical Psychologist employed by the Western Regional Health Authority and has provided mental health services for over 19 years in the Western Region. She is a past Board Member of the Peace Management Initiative of St. James and a consultant to the Ethics Review Board for Kidney Transplants in Western Jamaica and Bariatric Surgery Team. She previously served as Chair of the St. James Red Cross, and has conducted numerous psychosocial support trainings across the Caribbean on behalf of the International Federation of the Red Cross's Disaster Mental Health Unit, with a focus on the impact of trauma on children and adolescents.

Salvatore Simarmata

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Salvatore Simarmata is a visiting scholar in residence from April 1-30, 2026 and is hosted by Erik Nisbet, Owen L. Coon Endowed Professor in Policy Analysis & Communication. Simarmata is a Senior Lecturer in Communication at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia and Director of the Atma Jaya Institute of Public Policy, a research institute dedicated to advancing evidence-based policymaking for a sustainable future. His research focuses on political communication, particularly how digital platforms, automation, and the hybrid media system reshape strategies of attack politics, drive the circulation of disinformation, and influence democratic competition. In addition, his work examines how political actors and institutions as well as the media shape policymaking processes and narratives, and the decline of the deliberative public sphere in Indonesia.

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih

Buffett-EDGS Visiting Scholar

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih is a visiting scholar in residence from January 5–19, 2026 and is hosted by Laura Hein, Director of the Arryman Scholars Program within the Roberta Buffett Institute’s Equality Development & Globalization Studies Program (EDGS) Program and Harold H. & Virginia Anderson Professor of History at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences. Her visit is supported by a Buffett Global Collaboration Grant.

Widya Permata Yasih is the Deputy Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI). She earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. Her doctoral research investigates the expansion of precarious work arrangements tied to the gig economy and its effects on workers’ subjective experience, identity formation, and organizing propensity in Indonesia. She is also a faculty member at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia. She has published in outlets like the Jakarta Post, the Conversation, Indonesia at Melbourne, and others. One of her articles, “Jakarta’s Precarious Workers: Are They a New Dangerous Class?”, was published by the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2017.

Önder Eren Akgül

Postdoctoral Fellow

Contact: onder.akgul@northwestern.edu

Önder Eren Akgül is the 2024–2026 Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University. Akgül is a historian of capitalism, political economy and the environment in the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern Mediterranean. He is currently working on his first book manuscript, A Global Hinterland: Crisis and the Order of Accumulation in Late Ottoman Greater Izmir, an intertwined history of global capitalism, Ottoman political economy, and local labor and ecology. Akgül is concurrently developing two new research projects—the first exploring the history of extractivism in the Ottoman mountains and the second focusing on the global history of the left in Turkey during the long 1960s. Akgül is a regular producer for the Ottoman History Podcast. Before coming to Northwestern, Akgül taught classes on the history of Modern Turkey and global capitalism at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, and International Studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.