Dr. Nathan Fiala received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Irvine and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, honorary senior lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda, and a research fellow at RWI in Essen, Germany. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). His research focuses on growth and development, food security, household bargaining, individual preferences and community action. This includes work on micro-enterprise development, cash grants, micro-finance, business skills training, agricultural supply chains and community based anti-corruption programming. He has conducted research in several sub-Saharan Africa and Asian countries, including Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Myanmar and India, as well as Paraguay.

His work has been published in several top academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change and others. He also authored a book on impact evaluation methods with the World Bank and has published in Scientific American, a popular science magazine.