Speaker Biographies

Megan Davy is a research assistant in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include demography, immigration, and trade and economic development in Latin America.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Helping Enhance the Livelihood of People Around the Globe Commission, and he has served on both the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). For over twenty years, Mr. Eberstadt served as a member of Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies, and he continues to serve at Harvard as a member of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health. Mr. Eberstadt regularly consults for governmental and international organizations, including such institutions as the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. He has been invited to offer expert testimony before Congress on a variety of economic, social, and political issues. Mr. Eberstadt has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include Poverty in China (International Development Institute, 1979), Fertility Decline in the Less Developed Countries (Praeger Publishers, 1981), The Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988), Foreign Aid and American Purpose (AEI Press, 1989), The Population of North Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1992), The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995), Prosperous Paupers and Other Population Problems (Transaction, 2000), and Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis (AEI Press, 2004), and, most recently, Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health (AEI Press, 2007).

Hans Groth, M.D., is the director of health care policy and access for Pfizer Switzerland. In his current role, he is responsible for augmenting relations and communication with key stakeholders in the Swiss healthcare market. Dr. Groth is a Pfizer Global Health Fellow and a member of the board of directors of Pfizer Switzerland. His seventeen years of extensive industry experience in numerous European and overseas markets include the areas of clinical research, medical marketing, global product planning, as well as sales and negotiations with government agencies. In 2003, in his capacity as a Pfizer Global Health Fellow, he conducted HIV/AIDS epidemiological field research in Siberia and Central Asia on behalf of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Since then, he has supported HIV harm-reduction projects in the Lake Baikal region. Inspired by these experiences, Dr. Groth developed a deep interest in the health-wealth relationship in light of the dramatic global demographic changes taking place and their implications for various countries.

The Honorable Jim Kolbe currently serves as a senior transatlantic fellow for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He advises on trade matters as well as issues of effectiveness of U.S. assistance to foreign countries, on U.S.–European Union relationships, and on migration and its relationship to development. He also serves as an adjunct professor in the College of Business at the University of Arizona and serves on a part-time basis as a strategic consultant with Kissinger-McLarty Associates. For twenty-two years, Mr. Kolbe served in the U.S. House of Representatives, elected for eleven consecutive terms from 1985 to 2007. While in Congress, he served for twenty years on the Appropriations Committee. He was the chairman of the Treasury, Post Office, and Related Agencies Subcommittee for four years, and during his last six years in Congress, he chaired the Foreign Operations, Export Financing, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

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