Mohamad Ikhsan is the special advisor to the Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia. Earlier he was special advisor to the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs. He is concurrently a professor of economics at the University of Indonesia. Before joining the government, he was the director for the Institute of Economics and Social Research University of Indonesia. He also serves as a non-executive board member at several state owned enterprises and private companies. He also serves as a member of Board of Trustee International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, since 2008. He has Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA and a Master's Degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.