The Team

Sarah Burd-Sharps (Co-Director) was, until September of 2006, Deputy Director of the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In addition to being a contributor to almost every HDR beginning in 1998, she began to develop UNDP’s work on national and regional HDR’s in 2001. From the widely cited Arab HDR to influential HDR’s in China and on the Roma in Eastern Europe, Sarah was involved in training, monitoring standards of and peer-reviewing these reports and authored a Toolkit, Timeline and other practical handbooks for HDR teams around the world. Sarah was founding Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Development, outside editor of Transparency International’s first Global Corruption Report. Sarah holds an M.I.A. from Columbia University.

Kristen Lewis (Co-Director) is an independent consultant and writer with fifteen years’ experience in international development policy. She has worked primarily in the areas of gender, governance, environment, and water and sanitation. Kristen is co-author, under the leadership of Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Project, of the 2005 book Health, Dignity and Development: What will it take? as well as numerous other publications and reports. Kristen has extensive experience in development communications and advocacy, program design and management, policy analysis, research, and evaluation. Kristen holds an M.I.A. from Columbia University.

Eduardo Borges Martins (Statistics Director): Eduardo has worked on measuring human development for over 16 years, both in Brazil and the US, with expertise in data analysis and manipulation of large databases of socio-economic indicators. He was a senior member of the team that created a Human Development Index for Brazil’s over 5,000 municipalities, a project that won a United Nations award on “Excellence in the Innovative Use of Human Development Measurements Tools”. As a result of this work, the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais has adopted the “Robin Hood Law”-a fundamental shift in the allocation of state revenues to reward sound social and environmental policies and investment. Beginning in the late 80’s, Eduardo worked for the University of Illinois and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago designing statistical models for future economic scenarios for several US Midwestern states, and subsequently with the U.S. Bureau of Census on manufacturing data. Eduardo holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois.

Humantific | UnderstandingLab (report design and visual models) is an internationally recognized Visual SenseMaking firm located in New York and Madrid.