Dileni Gunewardena is Professor of Economics at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and has a Ph.D. in economics is from American University, Washington, D.C. Her research includes empirical analyses of poverty, child nutrition, and gender and ethnic wage inequality. She is the author of a book on Poverty Measurement, several chapters in books, and numerous journal articles. She contributed to Sri Lanka’s first poverty assessment as a consultant with the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Group in the 1990s and has taught in the World Bank Institute’s South Asia Region Workshops. She has been an Echidna Global Scholar at the Brookings Institute, a Global Development Network (GDN) Research Award winner and a Fulbright Research Scholar. She is a research group committee member of the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) research network, a member of the Centre for Poverty Analysis, Sri Lanka and is a regional co-coordinator (South Asia) of the academic steering committee of Global Association of Master’s in Development Practice Programmes.