Sarkar, Karra, Ochieng Join Pardee School Faculty
The Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University is pleased to welcome to its faculty three new members – Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations, Mahesh Karra, Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy, and Cosmas Ochieng, Associate Professor of the Practice of Global Development Policy.
“I am delighted to welcome our three new faculty members to the Pardee School and Boston University community,” said Pardee School Dean Adil Najam. “Each will bring further depth to the Pardee School’s existing strengths in security studies and global development policy while helping the school meet its strategic goals and mission of advancing human progress.”
Sarkar’s expertise is in nuclear proliferation, foreign policy, and the interactions between economic and security interests in the realm of nuclear exports. She was born and raised in Calcutta, India, and after a stint in Europe for graduate school, she moved stateside. Trained as a historian of the global Cold War, her research is an examination of the recent past to draw lessons for contemporary policy challenges. She is currently completing her first book on U.S. nonproliferation policy towards India from the Kennedy administration until the first Reagan administration while advancing on her second project on the challenges of controlling the global atomic marketplace posed by the politics of nuclear exports within major supplier states since the 1970s.
“My work is an investigation, based on multi-archival, multi-lingual research, of the politics surrounding the dual-use character of nuclear technologies and the challenges that creates. Most research focuses on either nuclear weapons or nuclear energy leading to incomplete analyses. That the two are intrinsically related, which poses substantial global proliferation risks as well as opportunities for the proliferator, is key to tackling the challenges in the nuclear realm,” Sarkar said. “I plan to train my students in archive-based research with a problem-solving approach so that they understand the past not merely as a series of disconnected events but as a treasure trove of data necessary to understand current security problems and foresee some of the future challenges.”
Karra’s academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. He has conducted field work in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and his current research uses randomized controlled trials to evaluate the health and economic effects of improving access to family planning and maternal and child health services in Malawi, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Tanzania. He has also worked for the Population Reference Bureau and the Futures Group International and served as a consultant to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Population Council.
“My research interests are broadly in international health and development economics, and my work focuses on investigating the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. I am also interested in applied mathematics and statistics for policy analysis and impact evaluation,” Karra said. “I am particularly excited to be a part of a community that emphasizes multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to seeing the world. I am really looking forward to learning from and engaging with students and faculty who actively embrace this view.”
Ochieng’s research and teaching interests focus on the theory, policy and practice of development; global climate change and environmental policy; science, technology and innovation policy; and the political economy of African development. Ochieng served as Executive Director of the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has also served as the Technical Coordinator for the Business, Economics and Biodiversity Program of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office in Pretoria; Climate Change Expert at the UNEP Risoe Centre (Technical University of Denmark); Lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture, Land and Water at Lancaster University in the UK; and Research Fellow, with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
“The Pardee School seeks ‘a future with peace that lasts, development that works and knowledge that transforms’,” Ochieng said. “This is a bold and a timely challenge which requires a combination of intellectual rigor, world class research and teaching, and global engagement and outreach. The Pardee School has the faculty, students, networks and enabling environment to lead this charge. I am delighted to be joining the team in pursuit of such a noble and challenging intellectual ambition and professional enterprise.”