New U4 Director

Liz comes to U4 from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she was Senior Anticorruption Advisor from 2004 to March 2010, leading efforts to provide technical guidance for anti-corruption programming. Some of the highlights from her recent experience include commissioning and testing USAID's first anti-corruption/good governance assessment framework, and developing programming guides on extractive industries, post-conflict/reconstruction programming and judicial corruption. Most recently, she has been USAID’s principle advisor for anti-corruption efforts in Afghanistan.  She has conducted assessments and provided strategy/programme design advice for teams in Cambodia, Ghana, Jordan, Malawi, Mongolia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Sao Tomé & Principe, Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania. Before that, Liz spent four years with USAID in Nigeria as Senior Democracy and Governance Advisor, managing staff and funds to develop and implement programs supporting civil society, legislative strengthening, elections, local governance and policy reform.

Liz earned her PhD in political science from Princeton University, focusing on the politics of economic reform in Africa. Since then, she has remained involved in teaching and training, serving as guest professor at American University for a course on Corruption in Development, and facilitating numerous seminars and workshops for government employees and other partners. Liz's current research interests include addressing corruption in post-conflict/fragile situations, approaches to mainstreaming anti-corruption efforts in broader development work, and issues around evaluation and impact measurement of anti-corruption programming.