Vinayak Bhardwaj

Vinayak Bhardwaj is the Executive Director for the Africa office of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

Before joining J-PAL, he worked as a senior health economist at the University of Witwatersrand. He worked as deputy country director and regional migration coordinator of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) South Africa. He has consulted widely for the Asian Development Bank, the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, Omidyar Network, Johns Hopkins Department of International Health, and the World Bank.

He has doctoral and masters’ degrees in public health from Johns Hopkins University where he was a Sommer Scholar and a recipient of an Oppenheimer Memorial Trust scholarship. Previously, he received a masters’ degree in chemical engineering from the University of Cape Town and a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry.