Michelle Kaffenberger
Michelle Kaffenberger is the Director of Evidence Translation for the What Works Hub for Global Education, University of Oxford, and Program Director at the SSRC. Her work focuses on making research on improving foundational learning actionable for policymakers and practitioners.
Previously, Michelle served as Deputy Director of Research with the RISE Programme at the University of Oxford, where she led research on aligning education systems for learning and oversaw the program’s strategic and research activities. She has also been a Senior Research Advisor at the World Bank, helping to launch a global partnership for social protection system reform.
Michelle has advised bilateral and multilateral organizations, major philanthropies, NGOs, and private sector actors. Her research has been featured in The Economist, Financial Times, CNN, and national newspapers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Indonesia. She holds a PhD in Global Development from the University of East Anglia and an MA in Development Economics from Vanderbilt University.
Noam Angrist
Noam Angrist is the Academic Director of the What Works Hub for Global Education. His interests focus on bridging the gap between evidence on ‘what works’ to enable young people to thrive and translation into scaled intervention and policy.
Noam has published in leading academic journals including Nature, Nature Human Behaviour, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. In addition, he has published across disciplines, including education, economics, public health, and the natural sciences. His research includes primary research on programme and policy effectiveness via randomised trials and natural experiments, building global databases and public goods, and synthesising evidence to inform policy.
He has consulted for the World Bank Chief Economist, FCDO’s Chief Economist, and led key aspects of the development of the World Bank Human Capital Index education pillar. This includes the development of Harmonized Learning Outcomes and a new global measure of education, Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling, which has been adopted as an indicator by the World Bank, FCDO and USAID to track education systems at the country level.
Noam led the development of UNICEF’s evidence menu for the Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Hub (FLN) hub in partnership with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). He also led the academic research underpinning the inaugural report of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, which reviewed over 150 impact evaluations in education and provided timely recommendations on cost-effective ‘smart buys’ to improve learning outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.
He is the co-founder of Youth Impact, one of the largest NGOs dedicated to scaling-up health and education programmes backed by rigorous randomised trial evidence. Headquartered in Botswana, the organisation has scaled evidence-based programmes to over 100,000 youth across ten countries.
Youth Impact has pioneered the use of A/B testing in the social sector to optimise evidence-based programmes on the path to scale, conducting 25 rapid randomised trials in just 36 months, in addition to conducting multiple large-scale randomised trials in partnership with J-PAL and the World Bank. The organisation has solidified multi-year partnerships with UNICEF, USAID, and the Brookings Institution and signed an MOU with the Botswana government to scale-up evidence-based programmes nationally.
During Covid-19, Youth Impact produced the world’s first evidence on distance education, published in Nature Human Behaviour, and has since re-tested and scaled the programme in five additional countries (India, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda, and the Philippines) with governments, NGOs, and multilateral partners within 18 months. These efforts represent some of the largest, fastest, multi-country evidence bases ever generated in education.
Noam has a BSc in Mathematics and Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a PhD (DPhil) from the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. Angrist was a Fulbright and Rhodes scholar, and his work has been recognised by Forbes, the Skoll World Forum, and the World Economic Forum.
Laura Conrad
Laura Conrad is a Senior Programme Manager with the What Works Hub for Global Education.
Laura’s career has focused on strengthening foundational learning outcomes globally. Previously, she was a Senior Advisor in USAID’s Center for Education where she supported the design and implementation of large-scale foundational learning programs in over 10 countries, with a specific focus on using structured pedagogy to strengthen foundational literacy instruction. In addition, she worked for USAID implementing partners, where she managed large-scale foundational learning programs in Rwanda, Liberia, Malawi, Pakistan and Zambia, working closely with government partners and organizations to ensure approaches were grounded in global evidence and adapted to the local context. In this role, she also managed USAID and FCDO program evaluations in Pakistan and Zimbabwe, working closely with donors, governments and partners to translate the evidence to inform program implementation.
Laura started her career as a classroom teacher in Washington, DC. She taught literacy and numeracy across multiple grades at the elementary-level, including a bilingual public school, where she gained experience supporting literacy acquisition for multilingual learners.
Laura received a MSEd in International Educational Development from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in International Studies from American University.
Belynda McNaughton
Belynda McNaughton is a Senior Education Specialist at the What Works Hub for Global Education. She is supporting an expansion of the Hub’s workstreams in Southeast Asia, working closely with partners such as the World Bank and Hempel Foundation to improve learning outcomes across the region.
Belynda brings over 20 years of experience working across Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), the World Bank and UNICEF, to bridge the policy-to-practice divide. Most recently, she served as Senior Education Adviser for DFAT, leading policy and planning advice across DFAT’s education portfolio, and supporting the design, implementation and evaluation of programs that scale evidence-based approaches to improve foundational skills. She shifted DFAT’s performance monitoring from a focus on enrolment to measuring learning and supported the adoption of practical, fit for purpose gender and inclusion strategies within programs.
Her in-country experience spans the Asia-Pacific, where she worked closely with Ministries to strengthen sub-national teacher training networks and support school leaders through adaptive, problem-driven approaches. Central to this work has been grounding evidence-based reforms in local systems by backing education leaders to adapt and find what works in their own contexts.
Belynda holds a MA in Educational Planning, Economics and International Development from the University College London, along with a B.Econ and BA from the University of Queensland.
Mary E. Breeding
Mary E. Breeding is a Senior Education Specialist with the What Works Hub for Global Education (WWHGE), supporting its partnership with Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Previously, she worked as a Senior Education Specialist and Consultant in the Education Global Practice at the World Bank. Her primary areas of specialization are teacher policy, education finance, and monitoring and evaluation, and she has also supported policy projects on early childhood development, student assessment, and school accountability.
Breeding’s work sits at the intersection of policy and practice, and has been published in outlets including the World Bank Research Observer and the International Journal of Education Development. In the past, she has worked on and evaluated programs in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cyprus, India, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Qatar, and Timor-Leste.
Before joining the World Bank, Dr. Breeding was a post-doctoral fellow at Georgetown University (2008–2010) and held the William E. Miller Fellowship at the American Political Science Association (2007–2008). She received her Ph.D. from American University in 2008.