Directors

Peter Lanjouw, (PhD London School of Economics), Professor in development economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is the overall Director and oversees all aspects of LIS’ work. Prior to joining the VU Economics department in January 2015 he had spent more than two decades in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank, most recently as Manager of the Poverty and Inequality team.

He has taught courses at the Delhi School of Economics, the Foundation for the Advanced Study of International Development, Tokyo, and the University of Namur, Belgium, and has held a visiting position at the University of California, Berkeley. He is current editor of the World Bank Research Observer and a past assistant editor of the World Bank Economic Review. He is a fellow of the Tinbergen Institute and a core member of the Global Poverty Commission, convened by the World Bank.

His main research interests are: i) measurement and analysis of poverty and inequality in developing countries; ii) structural transformation in developing economies; and iii) contribution of longitudinal village studies to the analysis of rural development. His work was published in journals like Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Economic Inequality, The Review of Income and Wealth etc.

Teresa Munzi is the LIS Director of Operations. She manages and oversees all operations, ensuring the smooth functioning of the organisation’s daily activities and the coordination of its national and international research and data projects. She has extensive experience in the harmonisation of microdata for the comparative analysis of socio-economic outcomes, with a particular focus on inequality and poverty in income, consumption, and wealth. Her recent work addresses the challenges of comparing welfare dynamics across high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

Teresa has a background in economics. She earned a degree in Economics from the University of Rome and an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Before coming to work at LIS in 2002, she held different positions at the Economics Directorate of the European Commission in Brussels, at the Chief Economist Office of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Investment in London, and at the UK Department for Education and Employment.

Philippe is an economist and a professor in inequality and social policy analysis at the University of Luxembourg’s Department of Social Sciences. He has a vast experience in micro-data analysis on poverty and inequality. Besides publishing numerous research in peer-reviewed journals, he has been developing software tools that are widely used worldwide for inequality, poverty and welfare analysis.

Philippe supports LIS in the following way: i) using the LIS data in his research and teaching with a view to increase LIS visibility and access, ii) advising the team on advanced methodological techniques to produce higher quality harmonised data, and iii) actively contributing to setting priorities in terms of LIS vision for the future.

Taylor is an economist with a research interest in education and social inequalities. She holds a Master’s degree in Economics from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from York University Glendon Campus.
Before joining LIS, she worked as a research analyst at LISER contributing to the Horizon 2020 PIONEERED project, researching educational (in)equalities in Europe and harmonising national and international education datasets.

Kun Lee is a quantitative social scientist and social policy researcher, focusing on how welfare state institutions shape inequalities from a comparative perspective. At LIS, Kun is involved in the (LIS)²ER project and mainly works on pension wealth inequality and old-age poverty across advanced democracies.
Prior to joining LIS, Kun completed his PhD and master’s in social policy at the University of Oxford and BA in social welfare and economics at Seoul National University.
Find more about Kun on his website (https://kunlee0910.github.io/)

Gonçalo holds a Master’s degree in Economics with a major in Policy Evaluation from NOVA School of Business and Economics in Lisbon since 2021. Before joining the LIS, he worked as a Research Assistant in a project aimed at building Portuguese wealth distribution series using survey data and National Accounts.
In 2022 he worked exclusively at the European Central Bank as the DG-Economics trainee in the “Consumer Expectations Survey (CES) project.”

Jörg is an economic sociologist. In May 2016, he defended his doctoral dissertation on Pension Systems and Income Inequality among the Elderly in Europe at the Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

At LIS, Jörg is supervising the data team in harmonizing datasets for the LIS databases, developing and maintaining data production and quality assessment applications, and overseeing the consistency of produced datasets. He is the editor of the LIS newsletter Inequality Matters.

Before joining the LIS data team in 2011, he worked as a Research Associate in a research project on governance of supplementary pension systems across Europe (GOSPE).

Heba Omar holds a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University. She then obtained a Master’s degree in Biostatistics and Demography from the Institute of Statistical Studies and Research at Cairo University. Her master’s thesis focused on The Development of Multidimensional Poverty Indices.

At LIS, Heba supports operational planning and system management, assisting in maintaining efficient workflows. She contributes to the data dissemination lifecycle, and ensures compliance with data governance and security regulations. Heba also assists with coordinating events, external projects, data acquisition processes, and microdata harmonization.

Before joining the LIS data team, she worked as a Senior Statistician at the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in Egypt and as Individual Consultant for the UNDP Regional Centre for the Arab States in Cairo.

Piotr Paradowski is a political economist. At LIS, he serves as a member of the data staff. He has comprehensive knowledge of quantitative social science methods and conducts research using the LIS data, focusing on income and wealth distributions as they relate to economic inequality, poverty, and welfare state politics.

Carmen is a social policy analyst specialised in labour market. She holds a PhD from Tilburg University, The Netherlands, Faculty of Social Sciences, Methodology and Statistics department and has a background in comparative social policy (MA in International Social Policy Analysis from Leuven University, Belgium), public policy and governance as well as political sciences.

Her research is focusing on labour market participation from a gender perspective, institutional, life course and cultural determinants of the labour market participation in later life and early retirement from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective.