D&G Frontiers: UNDP Human Development Report 2025

Pedro Conceição

Director

UNDP Human Development Report Office

Pedro Conceição is Director of the Human Development Report Office, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) since January 2019. Prior to that he held other roles at UNDP, including Director for Strategic Policy, Chief-Economist for Africa, and Director of the Office of Development Studies. He has published on financing for development inequality, global public goods, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in several journals and books. He is the lead author of the 2019, 2020, and 2021/22 Human Development Reports.

Prior to coming to UNDP he taught at the Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has degrees in physics from Instituto Superior Técnico, in economics from ISEG (Lisbon School of Economics and Management) and a Ph. D. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.

Mala Kumar

Interim Executive Director

Humane Intelligence

Mala Kumar is the Interim Executive Director at the AI evaluation organization, Humane Intelligence, and has deep expertise in UX research and design, open source software, and AI / ML for social good. Throughout her 15+ year career, she has led groundbreaking initiatives that have reached 50,000+ people globally and contributed to the Sustainable Development Goals.  Previously, she was a Director at MLCommons, where she helped build its inaugural AI safety benchmark. Before that, she was the Director of Tech for Social Good at GitHub. She spent the year after and the decade prior to GitHub working at the United Nations and INGOs, in both English and French. Since 2007, she has lived and worked extensively in four continents. While NYC is home, she regularly travels to speak at conferences, run meetings, and conduct field research. Separate from her tech work, she is the author of two novels. 

Jose Antonio Ocampo

Professor of Practice

José Antonio Ocampo is Co-Director of the Development and Governance Concentration in the School of International and Public Affairs, Member of the Committee on Global Thought and of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. He is also a member and was the Chair of the Committee for Development Policy, an expert committee of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and was Chair of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) in 2015-2022, and is a current member.

Prior to his appointment and on leave of absence for public service during his tenure at Columbia University, Ocampo has served in a number of positions in the United Nations and the Government of Colombia, most notably as United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs; Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC); Minister of Finance and Public Credit on two occasions; Chairman and member of the Board of Banco del República (Central Bank of Colombia); Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development; Director of the National Planning Department (Minister of Planning); and Executive Director of Fedesarrollo.

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