Ph.D. Spotlights

Sunghoon Chung

Sunghoon received his Ph.D. from SMU in 2013 under the supervision of Professor Dan Millimet. After graduation, he began working as a Research Fellow for a think tank in South Korea, the Korea Development Institute (KDI). He has also served at the World Bank since 2021 as a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group. Sunghoon's primary research fields are international trade and economic development. Using methods from microeconometrics, he specializes in assessing the causal effects of government policies particularly related to firms' international activities. He has published in various journals including Journal of Development Economics, European Economic Review, and the World Economy.

 Asif Dowla

Asif received his Ph.D. in 1986. He is now a Professor of Economics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a top-rated public liberal arts college. Before joining St. Mary’s, he taught at Illinois State and Marquette University. Asif’s field of study during graduate school was trade theory. He published two of the chapters of his dissertation written under the supervision of Ravi Batra. A sabbatical fellowship at the Nobel-prize-winning organization, Grameen Bank, led to a change in his research focus on microfinance. He has published articles in reputed journals on aspects of microfinance: leasing, savings mobilization, safety net provision, climate change adaptations, and social capital.

Asif is the co-author of The Poor Always Pay Back: The Grameen II Story, a well-reviewed book about the new and improved model of the Grameen Bank. The book is translated into Chinese, French, and Bahasa Indonesia.

At St. Mary’s, Asif received the Norton Dodge Award for Excellence in Teaching and was named the holder of the Landers Endowed Chair in the Liberal Arts. Asif is working on a book about the Bangladesh garment industry.

 Manini Ojha

Manini joined the PhD program at SMU in 2012 after serving as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Delhi University for three years. She received her PhD in 2018 under the supervision of Professor Daniel Millimet. After graduation, she returned to India and joined O. P. Jindal Global University as an Assistant Professor. She was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Economics at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Econometrics and is also the co-editor of the Jindal Journal of Public Policy.

Her research interests are at the intersection of applied econometrics, development economics, economics of households, economics of education, economics of gender, and health economics. Her current work focuses on contraception and child health; fertility targets and sterilization; and home-based school education during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is also interested in examining the effects of specific government policies in India. Her recent publications have been in the Journal of Development Studies, Applied Economics, Journal of International Development, Economics Letters and Education Policy Analysis Archives.