Professor Jeffrey Sachs

Special Advisor to United Nations

Jeffrey Sachs is Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease and hunger by the year 2015.

Professor Sachs is also the Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a non-profit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.

He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years, Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalisation, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability and, as Director of the Earth Institute, leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.

In 2004 and 2005 he was named among the100 most influential leaders in the world by Time Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honour bestowed by the Indian Government, in 2007.

Professor Sachs lectures constantly around the world and was the 2007 BBC Reith Lecturer. He is author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books, including the New York Times bestsellers Common Wealth (Penguin, 2008) and The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005). Professor Sachs is a member of the Institute of Medicine and is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent over twenty years at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs speaks on the B4MD initiative.