Anirudh Krishna

Anirudh Krishna is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research investigates how poor communities and individuals in developing countries cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness. Recent research projects have examined poverty dynamics at the household level for 35,000 households in India, Kenya, Uganda, Peru, and North Carolina, USA (www.sanford.duke.edu/krishna), examining both how people escaped poverty – and more important, how some came to be poor in the first place. A recent book, One Illness Away: How People Escape Poverty and Become Poor (Oxford University Press, 2010) presents these findings. Krishna is author or co-author of five other books and more than fifty journal articles and book chapters. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2011; the Olaf Palme Visiting Professorship from the Swedish Research Council in 2007; the Dudley Seers Memorial Prize in 2005; and the Best Article Award of the American Political Science Association, Comparative Democratization Section in 2002. Before returning to academia, Krishna spent 14 years with the Indian Administrative Service, managing diverse rural and urban development initiatives.