As DevLab’s Co-Founder and Director, Dr. Erica Field sets the strategic direction and research agenda for the lab. 

Dr. Field received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003. She is a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at Duke University. Prior to joining Duke, she was a John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In 2010, she was awarded the Elaine Bennet Prize for Research by the American Economic Association, which honors a woman economist under the age of forty who has made outstanding contributions in any field of economic research. 

Dr. Field specializes in the fields of development economics and economic demography. Her research focuses on the areas of marriage and family, property rights, global health, finance and entrepreneurship.

She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and IZA/DFID Growth and Labour Markets in Low Income Countries, among many others. She has published in several leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, The American Economic Review and The Review of Economic Studies. She has spent much of her career pioneering the use of field experiments to evaluate development policy and understand individual behavior. She is currently engaged in large-scale randomized program evaluations of strategies to empower adolescent girls in Bangladesh, an expansion of rural microfinance in India, the implementation of national domestic violence programming in Peru, among others.