Demographic Challenges for Sustainable Development

Laurence Simon, Professor Emeritus of International Development, is Director of the Center for Global Development and Sustainability at Brandeis University. He served as the senior adviser on global poverty to the executive director of the Google Foundation and was Visiting Scholar at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. He serves as joint editor-in-chief of CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion. He is a frequent invited lecturer at universities throughout the US and South Asia. His teaching today centers on development impacts of global and national demographic change. Earlier he was Director of Global Policy Analysis and Advocacy at Oxfam America and worked throughout Central America, Southern Africa, and South Asia. He served as the resident evaluation officer for the World Bank/United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on poverty reduction in Sri Lanka. A specialist in post-harvest losses, he founded GrainPro, Inc., the manufacturer of hermetic technologies for storage and transport of durable grains and commodities eliminating all insecticides and are used today in humanitarian operations by the UN World Food Program. Simon has been honored by the naming of the Laurence Simon Department of Economics at Woxsen University, India, and is the first foreigner to receive the Eashwari Bai Memorial Award from the Government of Telangana, India, and the Eashwari Memorial Trust for lifelong work on social justice. Simon earned his doctorate at Clark University's Graduate School of Geography studying landlessness and marginalization in El Salvador.