About Us

Toby Stuart

Faculty Director

Toby E. Stuart is the Helzel Chair in Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Innovation and Faculty Director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. Previously, he has been: The Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; the Arthur J. Samberg Professor and Faculty Director of the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School; and the Fred G. Steingraber-A.T. Kearney Professor of Leadership & Strategy at University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He received his first chaired, full professorship at the University of Chicago at the age of 32. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He holds an A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Carleton College.

Paul Gertler

Paul Gertler is the Li Ka Shing Professor of Economics in the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Scientific Director of the Center for Effective Global Action. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1985 and prior to UC Berkeley has held academic appointments at Harvard, RAND, and SUNY Stony Brook.

Dr. Gertler is an internationally recognized expert in impact evaluation. Dr. Gertler was Chief Economist of the Human Development Network of the World Bank from 2004-2007 and the Founding Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) from 2009-2012. At the World Bank he led an effort to institutionalize and scale up impact evaluation for learning what works in human development. At Berkeley he teaches courses in applied impact evaluation at both the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as in an executive education program for policy makers. He is the author of the best selling textbook Impact Evaluation in Practice and the recently released second edition, published by the The World Bank Press.

He has been a Principal Investigator on a large number of at-scale multi-site impact evaluations including Mexico’s CCT program, Progresa/Oportunidades, and Rwanda’s Health Care Pay-for-Performance scheme. He has published results from impact evaluations extensively in both scientific and policy journals on early childhood development, education, fertility and contraceptive use, health, HIV-AIDS, energy and climate change, housing, job training, poverty alleviation, labor markets, and water and sanitation. He was awarded the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics in 1996.

Jonathan Kolstad

Professor Kolstad is an Associate Professor of Economic Analysis and Policy at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also the co-director of the Health Initiative at the UC Berkeley Opportunity Lab.

Professor Kolstad is an economist whose research interests lie at the intersection of health economics, industrial organization and public economics. He is particularly interested in finding new models and unique data that can account for the complexity of markets in health care, notably the role of information asymmetries and incentives.

He has studied the impact of quality information on demand as well as intrinsic surgeon incentives. In a series of papers he has evaluated the impact of the Massachusetts health insurance expansion on a variety of outcomes. He has also gathered unique data to understand the role of information frictions in consumer decision making in insurance markets and on medical treatments.

Kolstad was awarded the ASHEcon Medal in 2018, given biennially to the economist age 40 or under who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics, the Arrow Award for the best paper in health economics in 2014 and the NIHCM Foundation Research Award in 2016 and 2018. Professor Kolstad is also a co-founder and was Chief Data Scientist at Picwell. Professor Kolstad received his PhD from Harvard University and BA from Stanford University.

Mathijs De Vaan

Mathijs De Vaan is currently working on several projects each of which uses network analytic techniques to answer questions about how relational structures guide the behavior of social actors. The substantive contexts of this research includes referral networks in healthcare, peer networks in CEO compensation, and collaboration networks in cancer research.