Who we are

Noreena Hertz is a renowned thought leader with an impressive track record in predicting global trends. Her best-selling books, The Silent Takeover, IOU: The Debt Threat and Eyes Wide Open, are published in 23 countries. She advises a select group of the world's leading business and political figures on strategy, economic and geo-political risk, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, millennials and post-millennials, and sits on the board of Warner Music Group. Previously, Noreena served on Citigroup's Politics and Economics Global Advisory Board and RWE's Digital Transformation Board. 

Dr Penny Bernstock was previously Professor of Urban and Community Studies and Head of Urban and Community Studies at the University of West London and prior to this Head of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of East London and Reader in Urban Regeneration, where she led the Centre for East London Studies. She has substantial experience in the design and leadership of innovative social science informed undergraduate and post graduate programmes that are practitioner focussed and underpinned by an inclusive curriculum. She has published extensively on a range of social policy issues. She is an expert on the impact of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Project. 

William Hynes is Co-ordinator of New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) in the Office of the Chief Economist at OECD which provides a space to question traditional economic ideas and offer new economic narratives, new tools, methods and policy approaches. He has led the NAEC work since 2016.

He previously worked as a Senior Advisor to the Secretary General, Advisor in the Sherpa and Global Governance Unit, Senior Economist in the Office of the Secretary General, Economist in the Development Co-operation Directorate and an Economic Affairs Officer in the Office of the Deputy Director General at the World Trade Organisation.

William is an Associate Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and an Applied Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He has a doctorate from Oxford University and was a Marie Curie Fellow at the London School of Economics.

Dennis Snower is Visiting Professor at the IGP. He is President of the Global Solutions Initiative, Berlin; Professorial Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oxford University; Non-resident Fellow at Brookings.

Previously he was Program Chair at The New Institute, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Professor of Economics at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel.

Dennis J. Snower earned a BA and MA from New College, Oxford University, an MA and a PhD at Princeton University. He is an expert on labor economics, socio-economics, public policy and inflation-unemployment tradeoffs. He is currently working on a new paradigm for economics with David Sloan Wilson. He is the author of a major report on digital governance with reform with Paul Twomey.

He has published extensively on employment policy, the design of welfare systems, and monetary and fiscal policy, and the role of psychological motivation systems in economic decision making.

He has been a visiting professor at many universities around the world, including Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Harvard, the European University Institute, Stockholm University, and the Vienna Institute of Advanced Studies. He has advised a variety of international organizations and national governments on macroeconomic policy, employment policy and welfare state policy. 

Dr Davies' research explores issues around prosperity, society and the environment. He is especially interested in the management of landscapes, ecological diversity, climate, and questions of sustainability, resilience and regeneration. Most of his work has focussed on agricultural systems in Eastern Africa and has examined community practice and knowledge both historically and anthropologically, often employing a perspective known as historical ecology. This has involved analyses of the spatial, material and temporal dynamics of farming systems, including understandings of soils, crops, irrigation, exchange networks and forests/vegetation. Dr Davies has also explored histories of failed external 'development' and his work is increasingly drawn towards wider analyses of food systems, agro-ecology, food sovereignity, farmer innovation and intersections with nutrition and health. His work often employs practices of physically mapping the landscape and he works closely with local Citizen Scientists within a trans-disciplinary framework. Much of this work aims to facilitate processes of co-design to reshape practice and policy.

George has completed a PhD in Economics and his research focuses on topics of applied political economy, institutions and development. He studies trust, corruption, legacies of violence and migration. 

Debananda (Deb) is interested in questions related to the organisation, management and governance of universities and the role of higher education in generating public outcomes. More broadly, he examines how knowledge production, dissemination and flows, as carried out by universities, startups, and organizational innovation units, can tackle public challenges and generate public value. He examines policies, systems, organizations, and structures related to knowledge and their effects on innovation and entrepreneurship, and professional work. 

Deb is a full-time faculty member at the School of Public Policy, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He is an affiliate member of the Centre for Innovation Research (CIRCLE) at Lund University, Sweden, and is the Associate Editor of the Higher Education Quarterly journal.