Nekeshia Gray

Visiting Scholar

Nekeshia Gray will serve as a Buffett Visiting Scholar from May 27 – June 26, 2026. Nekeshia is hosted by the Roberta Buffett Institute in partnership with the Weinberg College Center for Global Studies and the Program of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

Nekeshia Gray is a Fellow Chartered Accountant in Jamaica and an accounting lecturer at The University of the West Indies (UWI), where she teaches a range of accounting and finance courses. She is the recipient of the UWI Distinguished Teaching Award, recognized for her excellence and impact in higher education. Beyond academia, she is actively involved in mentorship, professional development, and leadership initiatives that support student growth and workforce readiness. Her work combines technical expertise, engaging teaching, and a passion for empowering the next generation of professionals.

Yohanan Benhaïm

Visiting Scholar

Yohanan Benhaïm is a Keyman Modern Turkish Studies visiting scholar in residence during May 2026 and an associate researcher at the Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds (IREMAM), in Aix-en-Provence, France. Between 2021 and 2025, he was a researcher and head of the contemporary studies department at the French Institute for Anatolian Studies in Istanbul. In 2021, he defended his doctoral thesis in Political Science entitled "Conquering the State. Foreign Policy and Transformation of the Politico-Administrative Field in Turkey", at Paris 1 Sorbonne University. His research focuses on the political sociology of foreign policy and diplomacy, the reconfiguration of the party field, and techno-nationalism in Turkey. He has recently co-edited several journal issues: in the journal Critique Internationale on the transformations of foreign affairs ministries during periods of political reconfiguration, and in the journal Pôle Sud on the transformations of electoral competition in the context of the presidentialization of Turkey's political regime.

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 June 30, 2026. 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.

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.  

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.

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.