place

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

2003 establishments in MassachusettsEconomic research institutesMassachusetts Institute of Technology research institutesOrganizations established in 2003Research on poverty

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed to reducing poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by rigorous, scientific evidence. J-PAL funds, provides technical support to, and disseminates the results of randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of social interventions in health, education, agriculture, and a range of other fields. As of 2020, the J-PAL network consisted of 500 researchers and 400 staff, and the organization's programs had impacted over 400 million people globally. The organization has regional offices in seven countries around the world, and is headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2019, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was jointly awarded to J-PAL co-founders Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, alongside economist Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". The Nobel committee highlighted Duflo and Banerjee's work building J-PAL in their report on the scientific background for the award, noting that the organization was "vital" in promoting the acceptance of randomized controlled trials as an empirical technique in development economics. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has described J-PAL as leading a "revolution in evaluation".

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
Main Street, Cambridge East Cambridge

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
placeShow on map

Wikipedia: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action LabContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 42.3625 ° E -71.087777777778 °
placeShow on map

Address

E19

Main Street 400
02142 Cambridge, East Cambridge
Massachusetts, United States
mapOpen on Google Maps

Share experience

Nearby Places

Wiesner Building
Wiesner Building

The Wiesner building (Building E15) houses the MIT Media Lab and the List Visual Arts Center and is named in honor of former MIT president Jerome Wiesner and his wife Laya. The building is very box-like, a motif that is consistently repeated in both the interior and exterior design evoking a sense of boxes packed within each other.The building is notable for the level of collaboration between the architect and artists. It stands apart from the surrounding neighborhood with its flat, gridded skin make of white, modular metal panels. The building's exterior was designed by Kenneth Noland is meant as a metaphor of technology through the grids of graph paper and number matrices while also quoting the corridor-like morphology of the rest of the MIT campus. Scott Burton, Alan Shields, and Richard Fleischner also collaborated extensively in the final design of the internal atria and external landscaping.The Wiesner Building in Cambridge, Massachusetts houses the MIT Media Lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms (Neil Gershenfeld's lab), the Department of Architecture's Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT, formerly the Visual Arts Program), the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program and the List Visual Arts Center. It was designed by I.M. Pei & Partners. It is named in honor of former MIT president Jerome Wiesner and his wife Laya and was dedicated in 1985. The Wiesner Building is also known to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community as Building E15.

MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art, and design. As of 2014, Media Lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner, and is housed in the Wiesner Building (designed by I. M. Pei), also known as Building E15. The Lab has been written about in the popular press since 1988, when Stewart Brand published The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T., and its work was a regular feature of technology journals in the 1990s. In 2009, it expanded into a second building.The Media Lab came under scrutiny in 2019 due to its acceptance of donations from convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This led to the resignation of its director, Joi Ito, and the launch an "immediate, thorough and independent" investigation into the "extremely serious" and "deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein" by President of MIT.In December 2020, Dava Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and former deputy administrator of NASA under Obama, was named the new director of the MIT Media Lab.