Speaker Biographies

David Devlin-Foltz is the director of the Global Interdependence Initiative at the Aspen Institute. He has more than twenty years of experience in public education, international exchange, and constituency building efforts in southern Africa and the United States. Before coming to the Aspen Institute in 1993, he worked for the Institute of International Education, the School for International Training, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. A Peace Corps volunteer at the National University of Rwanda from 1979 to 1981, David has taught and managed programs in France, Spain, and Zimbabwe. His written and edited works deal with the public role of religion, education in Namibia, and U.S. public attitudes toward global issues.

Deepak Lal is the James S. Coleman Professor of International Development Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and professor emeritus of political economy at the University College London. He has been a member of the Indian Foreign Service and a lecturer at Oxford University and the University of London. He was a full-time consultant to the Indian Planning Commission and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University, and he has served as a consultant to the International Labor Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and the ministries of planning in Korea and Sri Lanka. He has been codirector of the Trade Policy Unit at the Center for Policy Studies and chairman of the board of advisers for the Nestle Lecture on the developing world. He has been a member of the UK Shadow Chancellor’s Council of Economic Advisors and a distinguished visiting fellow at the National Council for Economic Research in New Delhi.

Mauro De Lorenzo is a resident fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at AEI, where he studies private sector–based approaches to development in postconflict and postsocialist countries; Chinese investment and political influence outside the Pacific region, particularly in Africa; and democratic accountability in aid-receiving countries. In 2005, Mr. De Lorenzo worked as a consultant to Afghan construction companies in Kabul, and prior to that he was a research associate at both the American University in Cairo and the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda, focusing on refugee policy and the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. In 2002, he researched and was associate producer of The Price of Aid, a BBC documentary about U.S. food aid to Africa.

Sarath Rajapatirana joined AEI as a visiting scholar from the World Bank, where he was an economic adviser. Previously, he was the division chief for trade and industry in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region for the World Bank, the team leader of the World Development Report on Trade and Industry, and the director of the research project on the macroeconomic performance of developing countries. Before joining the World Bank, he worked with the Division for Money and Banking Research in the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. His books include Trade Policies in Latin America and the Caribbean: Priorities, Progress, and Prospects (International Center for Economic Growth, 1997) and Liberalization and Industrial Transformation: Sri Lanka in International Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000).

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