Omar Arias is currently the Deputy Chief Economist in the World Bank East Asia and Pacific region. Previously, he was the Manager and Lead Economist for Global Knowledge and Innovation for Education, Practice Lead Economist of the Social Protection and Labor Global Practice and Global Lead for skills, Sector Manager and Lead Economist in the Human Development Economics Unit for the Europe and Central Asia region; Sector Leader of Human Development for Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela; Senior Economist in the Poverty Group of the Latin American region; and Research Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank.

In his publications, he has been a co-author of various flagship policy research studies, including regional studies on skills (The Skills Balancing Act in Sub-Saharan Africa), pensions (“The Inverting Pyramid: Pension Systems Facing Demographic Challenges in Europe and Central Asia”), jobs ("Back to Work: Growing with Jobs in Europe and Central Asia"); labor markets, poverty and inequality ("Informality: Exit and Exclusion" and “Poverty Reduction and Growth: Virtuous and Vicious Circles”); as well as numerous country studies on skills, informality and labor markets including in Argentina, Bolivia, China, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, Poland, and Romania. He has peer-reviewed publications in various topics, including estimation of returns to schooling and skills, socio-emotional skills, labor market dynamics, determinants of income mobility, growth, poverty and inequality, human capital accumulation, tax evasion, and in applied econometrics.

He was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he obtained his master's degree and doctorate in economics.

Svenja Gudell is Chief Economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. She currently serves as the vice chair on the Federal Economic Statistic Advisory Committee (FESAC). Svenja also served on the Board of Directors for the National Association for Business Economics. Prior to joining Indeed, Svenja was Chief Economist at Zillow Group. Previously, Svenja worked on economic, financial and strategic consulting for Analysis Group, and was an assistant economist in the research group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Svenja has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Rochester, a master’s degree in Economics from New York University, a master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D. in Finance from the University of Rochester.

David Johnson is Reader in Comparative and International Education. He convenes the Centre for Comparative and International Education.

He is the Programme Research Lead for the ESRC-DFID Raising learning Outcomes in Education Systems Research Programme and Academic Lead for the Aga Khan Foundation funded Research Programme on Education and Uncertainty.

He is a Chartered Educational Psychologist who studies learning and cognition and is particularly interested in tracking learning progression in national systems of education over time. Recent work includes time series studies of learning in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Sudan.

Ece Kamar is the Managing Director of AI Frontiers, leading research and development towards pushing the frontiers of AI capabilities. AI Frontiers is a non-geographical, mission-focused lab inside Microsoft Research that explores innovations in foundation models and platform capabilities to push the frontier of AI capabilities, efficiency and control.

Ece’s personal research focuses on developing AI systems that can function reliably in the open world in collaboration with people. She has a decade of experience studying the impact of AI on society and developing AI systems that are reliable, unbiased and trustworthy. She has been instrumental in building the Responsible AI efforts inside Microsoft. She serves as Technical Advisor for Microsoft’s Internal Committee on AI, Engineering and Ethics. 

Ece is also an Affiliate Faculty with the University of Washington. 

Fernando Valenzuela Migoya is a global leader in educational technology, driving transformative change not just in Latin America but in over 20 countries worldwide. With over 30 years of diversified experience in education, finance, and technology, he was recognized as the "Global Visionary of the Year" by EdTech Digest in 2022. A multi-dimensional professional, Fernando specializes in achieving impact at scale through investment product design, institutional build-up, and innovative educational solutions.

Founder of EdLatam: Leading this groundbreaking network, Fernando facilitates open innovation projects that bring the brightest minds together to revolutionize education

Fernando was President for Latin America at McGraw Hill Education, Cengage Learning, and was the Vice President of consulting and services for Hewlett Packard Latin America.

Roy has vast professional experience in AI and Education policy research and Data governance architectures. Roy is currently the Digital transformation lead at UNESCO and Human-Computer Interaction researcher at UdP, where he studies how learners affect during the learning environment and architect applications that acknowledge holistic profiles of learners while developing predictive indicators to their mental health. He had architect-ed the Affect-aware Digital platform while at UNESCO’s research institute for analyzing and modelling learner cognitive and affective trajectory while administering Social & Emotional Learning competency and building mental well being digital courses. Roy has developed real-world, inclusive applications leveraging AI, cognitive modelling, human-machine interaction, data mining, & data visualization with focus on human flourishing.

Matt Sigelman is President of the Burning Glass Institute.  He has dedicated his career to unlocking new avenues for mobility, opportunity, and equity through skills.  

Matt and his team created the field of real-time labor market data, a breakthrough innovation that has transformed the way that policy makers, researchers, employers, education institutions, and workers understand, plan for, and connect with the world of work.  By mining billions of job openings and career histories, Matt led the company that has become Lightcast to become a leading authority on the global market for talent, harnessing advanced AI and natural language processing to render data that provide unprecedented granularity on the changing landscape of opportunity for workers. 

By tracking demand for tens of thousands of skills across over 30 countries, Matt’s work has cracked the genetic code of an increasingly dynamic market, with deep insights that not only chart how work is being redefined but also identify the skills that bridge the gap between people and opportunity.  This intelligence is critical in protecting the workforce from obsolescence and in highlighting routes to social mobility even amidst the threat of massive automation-driven displacement. 

Matt has served as a Visiting Fellow and now Senior Advisor at The Harvard Project on the Workforce. Before launching the Burning Glass Institute, Matt served as CEO, and then Chairman, of Lightcast for over twenty years.  Previously, Matt worked at McKinsey & Company and at Capital One.  He is also Founder of the Main Line Classical Academy, an elementary school bringing the classical liberal arts curriculum and rigorous study in math and science to the kindergarten level on up and dedicated to the idea that children are never too young to learn great things.   

He writes widely on the job market and is consulted frequently by public officials and the global media. Matt holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard.

Rebecca Winthrop is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on education globally, with special attention to the skills young people need to thrive in work, life, and as constructive citizens.

Winthrop works to promote quality and relevant education, including exploring how education innovations and family and community engagement can be harnessed to leapfrog progress, particularly for the most marginalized children and youth. She advises governments, international institutions, foundations, civil society organizations, and corporations on education issues. She currently serves as a board member and adviser for a number of global education organizations and lectures at Georgetown University.

She currently leads the Brookings Family Engagement in Education Network and co-leads the Brookings Community Schools Forward Task Force. She has served as the chair of the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group, helping to frame an education vision that focuses on access, quality, and global citizenship. With UNESCO Institute of Statistics, she co-led the Learning Metrics Task Force that involved inputs from education professionals in over 100 countries to identify how to measure what matters in education systems. She has been a member of numerous other global education initiatives including the G-20 Education Task Force, the Mastercard Foundation’s Youth Learning Advisory Committee, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Councils on education, and an education adviser to the Clinton Global Initiative.

Prior to joining the Brookings Institution in June 2009, Winthrop spent 15 years working in the field of education for displaced and migrant communities. As the head of education for the International Rescue Committee, she was responsible for the organization’s education work in over 20 conflict-affected countries. She has been actively involved in developing the evidence base around and global attention to education in the developing world. In her prior position, she helped develop global policy for the education in emergencies field, especially around the development of global minimum standards for education in contexts of armed conflict and state fragility.